Heat

Heat — page 1
he sting we feel after touching a hot pan the welcome reliefоf a cold drink on a warm day and the comfort of a heater as it thaws our frozen limbs are sensa tions that are familiar to most of us indeed hotness and coldness texture a number of our everyday experiences We may throw around terms such as heat and temperature casually in conversation to describe what we perceive in such situations but physics shows us that these are not interchangeable terms As you will discover in these pages we must begin at the atomic level of matter to understand heat and the related concepts of temperature and thermal energy as well as the relationships between them In physics the term heat refers to the energy that is transferred from a warmer object to a colder one The energy that is transferred must of course come from some where In fact it all starts with the atoms and molecules that compose all matter Each of these particles is constantly moving and gen erating energy from this motion This is called kinetic energy The total amount of kinetic energy an object has is equal to its thermal energy that is the energy that an object has stored as a result of its temperature To