How would this belief pay rent if one doesn’t have a lot of chemistry to start off with and hasn’t done a very large set of experiments? Would it look any different than cold is the absence of heat? The flowing behavior can be easily explained either way.
Also, one thing that’s very clear from a lot of history is how much the ancients could have learned if they just were a bit more wiling to do direct experiments. They did them but only on rare occasions. There’s no reason that the scientific method could not have shown up in say 200 BCE.
A description of an experiment they could have done would be a fine answer to my question, even though they weren’t inclined to do them.
Perhaps the experiment is obvious to you? I don’t know what it would be.
How would this belief pay rent
This is a good question and I’m not confident it could or couldn’t. It’s more a thought experiment to rethink how much medium-hanging fruit there is today. If they could have figured it out even though it couldn’t have paid rent, so much the better.
Perhaps the experiment is obvious to you? I don’t know what it would be.
That’s my problem. I can see sets of experiments that form long chains that eventually get this result, but I don’t see it as an easy result by itself.
I suppose that if they had kept experimenting with Hero’s version of the steam engine they might have started to develop the right stuff. That might be the most natural way that it could have gone.
Part of the problem is that in order to get decent chemistry you need to do enough experiments to understand conservation of mass. And when gasses are released that requires very careful measurements. And in order to even start thinking in that vein you probably want enough physics understanding to understand that mass matters a lot. (There’s good reason that conservation of mass becomes a discussed and experimented with issue after Newton and Galileo and all those guys had developed basic physics). Then, if one has steam engines also and has a notion of work, one can start doing careful experiments and see how things function in terms of specific heat (how different substances take different amounts of heat to reach the same temperature). If one combines that with how gases behave and has that gases are composed of little tiny particles then a pseudokinetic theory of heat results.
I know however that the caloric theory of heat didn’t require a correct theory of gases. This makes me wonder if there’s an easier experimental pathway, whether this is a lucky guess, or whether it is just that there are a lot more examples in nature of things that seem to produce heat than things that seem to produce cold. (As has already been noted in this subthread, there are definitely things that would seem to produce cold.)
How would this belief pay rent if one doesn’t have a lot of chemistry to start off with and hasn’t done a very large set of experiments? Would it look any different than cold is the absence of heat? The flowing behavior can be easily explained either way.
Also, one thing that’s very clear from a lot of history is how much the ancients could have learned if they just were a bit more wiling to do direct experiments. They did them but only on rare occasions. There’s no reason that the scientific method could not have shown up in say 200 BCE.
A description of an experiment they could have done would be a fine answer to my question, even though they weren’t inclined to do them.
Perhaps the experiment is obvious to you? I don’t know what it would be.
This is a good question and I’m not confident it could or couldn’t. It’s more a thought experiment to rethink how much medium-hanging fruit there is today. If they could have figured it out even though it couldn’t have paid rent, so much the better.
That’s my problem. I can see sets of experiments that form long chains that eventually get this result, but I don’t see it as an easy result by itself.
I suppose that if they had kept experimenting with Hero’s version of the steam engine they might have started to develop the right stuff. That might be the most natural way that it could have gone.
Part of the problem is that in order to get decent chemistry you need to do enough experiments to understand conservation of mass. And when gasses are released that requires very careful measurements. And in order to even start thinking in that vein you probably want enough physics understanding to understand that mass matters a lot. (There’s good reason that conservation of mass becomes a discussed and experimented with issue after Newton and Galileo and all those guys had developed basic physics). Then, if one has steam engines also and has a notion of work, one can start doing careful experiments and see how things function in terms of specific heat (how different substances take different amounts of heat to reach the same temperature). If one combines that with how gases behave and has that gases are composed of little tiny particles then a pseudokinetic theory of heat results.
I know however that the caloric theory of heat didn’t require a correct theory of gases. This makes me wonder if there’s an easier experimental pathway, whether this is a lucky guess, or whether it is just that there are a lot more examples in nature of things that seem to produce heat than things that seem to produce cold. (As has already been noted in this subthread, there are definitely things that would seem to produce cold.)