[time-nuts] Thunderbolt stability and ambient temperature

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Thu Jun 11 08:03:30 UTC 2009


In message <4A309B30.7000400 at sonic.net>, Rex writes:

>My observation, from doing this 
>several times, is that the cold water quickly absorbes heat from the red 
>end, but also seems to chase a lot of the heat quickly up toward the 
>cold end, making the bar rapidly uncomfortable to hold.

I've seen the effect you describe explained in an article somewhere,
very likely New Scientist or SciAm about five years ago.

When you rapidly heat or cool metals, very often changes in crystal
lattice structure is involved some of them resulting in quite drastic
changes to volume.

Heat is essentially atoms wiggling about, and when you change the
modes of freedom for the atoms, they may have to wiggle harder.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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