2 ms·

Addendum: OK, here's my problem... Soil temperature. That is, when you dig more than a few feet into the soil, more than a few feet into the ground -- what yo

Addendum: OK, here's my problem... Soil temperature. That is, when you dig more than a few feet into the soil, more than a few feet into the ground -- what you'll find is consistent ground temperature, no matter what part of the world you're in, no matter how hot or how cold the above climate is. See, if there is conservation of heat, and the center of our planet is as hot as the sun -- then why doesn't/hasn't this heat diffused out across the entire interior of the planet? If you heat soil that's more than a few feet down up, it's going to cool, and if you cool it, it's going to heat back up. Sure, you could argue that this heat is moved and diffused into the adjacent ground/soil, but are we really sure that there isn't some other kind of phenomena going on there? Objects get very cool in outer space... near zero, yet they get hot, extremely hot, when the suns rays, unshielded by the earth's atmosphere, touch them. How do objects cool down in space, if by definition, space is a vacuum, and vacuum = thermal insulation? In other words, I have a Thermos(tm), with a vaccuum chamber inside of it on one hand, and the vaccuum of outer space on the other. The Thermos keeps my cold beverages cold, and my hot beverages hot. It does this by preventing thermal dissipation. It does this by putting a vacuum between the interior and exterior containers. In outer space, on the other hand, if sunlight is blocked for whatever reason, temperatures of objects get very, very cold. Where does the heat (aka, information) go, if space is a vacuum? You see, the paradoxes with respect to vacuums, and thus heat transfer in vacuums, and thus Heat = Information abound... Perhaps they would be solved if heat could travel through the vacuum (radiant energy?) in an effect much like Quantum Tunneling -- just the outer space / heat -- version of that? I'm not an expert in any of these areas... Can anyone help me out?

dr_zoidberg 6y ago
Heat is radiated as infrared light in a vacuum, and it's an extremely slow process compared to convection and conduction. Read about black body radiation[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago
  Black body radiation is interesting and does make sense, but then it brings up another question, which is: "If there is black body radiation everywhere in space -- then why doesn't space itself heat up until it's eventually the temperature of the Sun?" Maybe objects in space, such as planets, act as "heat drains" for the rest of space... that is, all of the heat (information) in space eventually winds up at a physical planet, or other object in space... If this is true, then this leads to an interesting identity, which is basically that every element, that is, everything on the periodic table from hydrogen on downward, is not just an element, not just matter, but also has an identity in terms of heat/information... In other words, every single element (and by extension substance) is what it is, but could also be thought about simultaneously as heat, and simultaneously as information. Which brings up endothermic/exothermic chemical reactions. That is, chemical reactions between two or more elements (for example, hydrogen and oxygen combining to produce water) where heat is produced (combining them via fire), or where heat is consumed (note that the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis, as far as I know, is neither endothermic or exothermic -- so where did the information go? Into the electricity? It's possible, we can't rule out that possibility...) And then the next question... Do chemical elements combined as a compound (such as water) then store the information as heat from the reaction somehow, or does it somehow dissipate, does that information somehow come back when they are separated? I don't know the answer to any of these questions; I'm just thinking aloud, but my intutive mind says that there may be something to discover there...
  - goldenkey 6y ago
    Yeah information <=> energy. Change of state is equivalent mathematically to movement in a "dimension." Action in physics is energy times time. Really just a way to measure the total number of absolute changes that have occurred. All energy causes change, it is all linked to entropy and information, it is likely zero in total... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe
    - peter_d_sherman 6y ago
      I like everything that you've said, but of particular interest is this: Change of state is equivalent mathematically to movement in a "dimension." I'd love to discover more information about that idea! URLs and/or book recommendations about that topic would be most appreciated!
rckoepke 6y ago
You've actually asked quite a lot of questions here, and the answers can be modeled fairly simply using "heat transfer" fundamentals. Additionally, it's good to know that heat can lost in space by converting to photons and emitting those photons from the object as "blackbody" (colloquially "infrared") radiation. Light/radiation/photons can travel through a vacuum so that's how heat leaves an object in space, and how some heat leaves earth. Your thermos example is a bit confusing because it's a thin wall. For understanding heat transfer it's better to use medium thickness walls. It's hard for me to come up with a real-world example that we'd have intimate familiarity with because we can't typically reach inside a solid material with our fingers. I'd like to point out this illustration[0] though, which is used in many university textbooks for introduction to transport phenomena (the study of mass and heat flows). If you have a near-perfect insulator and expose one side to heat, the other side will remain cool. Between the one side and the other, the temperature must gradually change from hot to cold. The earth is a pretty big insulator, so it keeps most of the core's heat in, and makes the surface much cooler than the core. Different layers of the earth have different properties, so the "steepness" of that transition from hot to cold changes suddenly at certain depths where the earths material changes. You can see Earth's temperature gradient here[1]. Definitely, if Earth absolutely could not get rid of its heat, eventually all the layers would be the same temperature. However, enough is lost to space each year to keep the surface "cool". It's actually a very, very, very tiny amount of the heat that is lost to space. The temperature of the core is 5000K-7000K but has only lost 250K over the past 4.5 billion years. Evidently the earth is a particularly good insulator. I used to help drill pretty deep holes in earth, going down 5,000-10,000 feet or more. Temperature of the earth at that depth could be actually quite hot, like 250-350 degF. 0: (Image of a simple thermal profile through a medium thickness wall of uniform material) https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B9780124158917000121-f12-03-9780124158917.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B97801241589170... 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Temperature_schematic_of_inner_Earth.jpg/275px-Temperature_schematic_of_inner_Earth.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Te... 2: (Energy balance of earth) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget 3: (Solar energy balance of earth) https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/energy https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/energy

dr_zoidberg 6y ago

Heat is radiated as infrared light in a vacuum, and it's an extremely slow process compared to convection and conduction. Read about black body radiation[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

peter_d_sherman 6y ago
Black body radiation is interesting and does make sense, but then it brings up another question, which is: "If there is black body radiation everywhere in space -- then why doesn't space itself heat up until it's eventually the temperature of the Sun?" Maybe objects in space, such as planets, act as "heat drains" for the rest of space... that is, all of the heat (information) in space eventually winds up at a physical planet, or other object in space... If this is true, then this leads to an interesting identity, which is basically that every element, that is, everything on the periodic table from hydrogen on downward, is not just an element, not just matter, but also has an identity in terms of heat/information... In other words, every single element (and by extension substance) is what it is, but could also be thought about simultaneously as heat, and simultaneously as information. Which brings up endothermic/exothermic chemical reactions. That is, chemical reactions between two or more elements (for example, hydrogen and oxygen combining to produce water) where heat is produced (combining them via fire), or where heat is consumed (note that the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis, as far as I know, is neither endothermic or exothermic -- so where did the information go? Into the electricity? It's possible, we can't rule out that possibility...) And then the next question... Do chemical elements combined as a compound (such as water) then store the information as heat from the reaction somehow, or does it somehow dissipate, does that information somehow come back when they are separated? I don't know the answer to any of these questions; I'm just thinking aloud, but my intutive mind says that there may be something to discover there...
- goldenkey 6y ago
  Yeah information <=> energy. Change of state is equivalent mathematically to movement in a "dimension." Action in physics is energy times time. Really just a way to measure the total number of absolute changes that have occurred. All energy causes change, it is all linked to entropy and information, it is likely zero in total... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe
  - peter_d_sherman 6y ago
    I like everything that you've said, but of particular interest is this: Change of state is equivalent mathematically to movement in a "dimension." I'd love to discover more information about that idea! URLs and/or book recommendations about that topic would be most appreciated!

rckoepke 6y ago

You've actually asked quite a lot of questions here, and the answers can be modeled fairly simply using "heat transfer" fundamentals. Additionally, it's good to know that heat can lost in space by converting to photons and emitting those photons from the object as "blackbody" (colloquially "infrared") radiation. Light/radiation/photons can travel through a vacuum so that's how heat leaves an object in space, and how some heat leaves earth. Your thermos example is a bit confusing because it's a thin wall. For understanding heat transfer it's better to use medium thickness walls. It's hard for me to come up with a real-world example that we'd have intimate familiarity with because we can't typically reach inside a solid material with our fingers. I'd like to point out this illustration[0] though, which is used in many university textbooks for introduction to transport phenomena (the study of mass and heat flows). If you have a near-perfect insulator and expose one side to heat, the other side will remain cool. Between the one side and the other, the temperature must gradually change from hot to cold. The earth is a pretty big insulator, so it keeps most of the core's heat in, and makes the surface much cooler than the core. Different layers of the earth have different properties, so the "steepness" of that transition from hot to cold changes suddenly at certain depths where the earths material changes. You can see Earth's temperature gradient here[1]. Definitely, if Earth absolutely could not get rid of its heat, eventually all the layers would be the same temperature. However, enough is lost to space each year to keep the surface "cool". It's actually a very, very, very tiny amount of the heat that is lost to space. The temperature of the core is 5000K-7000K but has only lost 250K over the past 4.5 billion years. Evidently the earth is a particularly good insulator. I used to help drill pretty deep holes in earth, going down 5,000-10,000 feet or more. Temperature of the earth at that depth could be actually quite hot, like 250-350 degF. 0: (Image of a simple thermal profile through a medium thickness wall of uniform material) https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B9780124158917000121-f12-03-9780124158917.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B97801241589170... 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Temperature_schematic_of_inner_Earth.jpg/275px-Temperature_schematic_of_inner_Earth.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Te... 2: (Energy balance of earth) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget 3: (Solar energy balance of earth) https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/energy https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/energy