My temperature is 310

(Kelvin, that is.)

Last night over tea we got talking about temperatures. I think it was because we’d all got caught in the rain on the way home and Katy was saying that maybe A was grumpy because she was cold, and then K asked what temperature she should be. I said it should be 37.5C (or should this be 37?). (In case you’re thinking about phoning Social Services, all the children had a bath to warm up, but A had to wait until the bigger 3 had had tea.)

This led on to Fahrenheit and Celsius, and how they were derived. I knew everything apart from what 0F was, but now thanks to Wikipedia I think it was the coldest outdoor temperature that Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit could record – in Gdansk it reached -17.8C and so this was chosen as 0 (or maybe it was one of the alternative reasons).

Then, via heat = movement of atoms we got to Kelvin and absolute zero. J asked me an interesting question – when you heat up something, how much friction is there between the atoms / molecules? Someone who knows more physics than me please help us out!

When I stick a pan of water on the cooker, how does turning up the temperature translate into the water molecules moving faster? That’s possibly a bit easy as it’s through lots of physical stuff, so how about sunshine landing on a solar panel? How does sunlight get the water molecules moving faster? And is the energy in the water just held in the kinetic energy of the molecules, or is there friction (if that makes sense at the molecular level) or some kind of potential energy that the kinetic energy changes into every so often?

5 thoughts on “My temperature is 310”

  3. Welcome out of lurkdom, Beardie. 🙂 Watch out – you’ll be using emoticons next.

    Thanks Jax – that helps but if I prod I get confused again. I can’t understand the concept of friction between molecules. If I rub my hands together, the roughness of my hands means that some bits of my skin stick up and so bash into the sticking up parts of my other hand as my two hands move over each other.

    So the friction between my hands is explained by the little bits hitting each other and so passing energy to each other (unless I’ve got it really wrong). What about friction between molecules? What are the little sticking out bits? Electrons? Magic moon beams?

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