4 ms·
There's no such thing as too cold, only incorrect clothing. If you have sufficient clothing you can be quite warm at any temperature.
by mlindner 4y ago
There's no such thing as too cold, only incorrect clothing. If you have sufficient clothing you can be quite warm at any temperature.
- sharkweek 4y agoI dabble in the type two fun that is mountaineering, and this is true. A good puffy and head coverings can make even the coldest temps totally bearable.
- bombcar 4y agoYou can get infinitely hot but only so cold. Curse you thermodynamics!
- Etheryte 4y agoI'm not entirely sure, is this practically true? I would expect there to be an upper limit to energy we can concentrate in a given volume even when cosmic scales are involved.
- bombcar 4y agoI believe there is a technical physical limit but it’s insanely high (which is why “temperature in the center of the sun/nuclear blast” doesn’t really work). There’s no theoretical limit, no absolute hot to go with absolute zero.
- Vecr 4y agoWell, heat is caused by particles moving around, and they can only go the speed of light max, so there is a limit. It's still extremely hot though, anything physical would be blown apart by the surrounding near light speed particles in an imperceptibly short time.
- tialaramex 4y agoAlthough temperature can be analogised to particles moving around I believe that at the extremes the fact that's just an analogy causes problems which would be relevant here.
- Vecr 4y agoWhat do you mean by "analogised"? That's literally what's happening, at least in a classical sense, right? Brownian noise, etc? I suppose it's not quite that on a quantum level though, it's closer to nuclear physics.
- tialaramex 4y agoExactly, the problem is that at extremes "classical" physics doesn't explain what we can observe.
- wcoenen 4y agoThere is probably still a limit, because you need to breath fresh air. A human breathes at about 6 liter/minute. In terms of mass and converting to seconds, that's 0.1293 gram/second. Heat capacity of air is 0.7 Joules per gram per kelvin. So the power needed to heat up incoming air 1 degree kelvin is 0.1293*0.7=0.09051 Watt. Times a hundred (-60C to body temperature), that's 9 watt. Since the human body produces about 100 watt of heat in total, that's maybe still feasible. But having that percentage of your body heat being drawn out through your airways and lungs is getting dangerous. And it gets colder on Antarctica. And exertion will speed up breathing. Researchers on Antarctica apparently deal with by breathing through snorkels that pass through their jacket, so that the rest of the body can help to heat up the air: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24731-coldest-place-on-earth-tucked-in-antarctic-ice-pocket/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24731-coldest-place-o... Perhaps it would also be possible to recover some of the heat in exhaled air, by passing it through a heat exchanger for the incoming air.
- euroderf 4y agoSort of like an Arrakeen stillsuit but for heat.
- joshvm 4y agoI'd stress that this is at the colder locations on the continent, not the South Pole. The bigger challenge is actually the altitude. Physiological altitude can (occasionally) hit 14k ft at the Pole and those days are rough. Temperature bottoms out around -100 F/-72 C and if you're outside, you're breathing through a gaiter/balaclava). That's sufficient to warm it up. I don't recall there ever being a situation (even that cold) when breathing was challenging due to the temperature alone. Weird fact: you can't whistle when it gets that cold. I don't know if it's something to do with the immediate dense condensation or the temperature. It's not the pressure or the humidity, because indoors is OK.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoCan you explain how physiological altitude works? I've never heard of it.