You know that you are in Texas when: The best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance. Hot water now comes out of both taps. You can make instant sun tea. You learn that a seat belt makes a pretty good branding iron. The temperature drops below 95 and you feel a bit chilly. You discover that in July it takes only two fingers to drive your car. You discover that you can get sunburn through your car window. You actually burn your hand opening the car door. You break a sweat the instant you step outside at 7:30 am before work. No one would dream of not having air conditioning. Your biggest bicycle wreck fear is: 'What if I get knocked out and end up lying on the pavement and cook to death?' You realize that asphalt has a liquid state. The birds have to use potholders to pull worms out of the ground. The potatoes cook underground and all you have to do to have lunch is to pull one out and add butter, salt, and pepper. Farmers are feeding their chickens crushed ice to keep them from laying hardboiled eggs. Cows are giving evaporated milk. The trees are whistlin' for the dogs.
It's an "emergent property" of motion. In a red-hot piece of iron the atoms are moving in that they're vibrating rapidly. Put an ice-cold piece of iron on top of it, and some of this vibrational motion is transferred to the cold iron, which warms up.
Pretty much. But in a gas the motion isn't vibrational. The typical speed of air molecules at "room temperature" is about 500m/s. Have a look on google.
A nice way of putting it is heat is the average kinetic energy of the particles making up the substance.
Heat is energy transferred from one object to another due to a temperature difference between them. Average kinetic energy of particles is related to temperature, not heat.
Thank you, James R, for correcting these neophytes. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It is interesting to think of heat in equilibrium conditions however. Thermal energy emissions can be seen as changes in energy levels of a large set of maxwell botzman distributed energies. There are fluctuations which have quantifiable effects on macro scale objects. To say there is no heat in equilibrium would be the 'correct' answer, however, it is not the WHOLE truth.
Hope you don't mind, but I just sent this post off to my email list. It took awhile because I was laughing so hard couldn't see. And we just went through a ten day stretch last summer that was over 100 F and as high as 112.
