In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.
But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I’m totally stuck.
It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you’re talking about campfires, self-cleaning ovens, welding torches, incandescent filaments, fighter jet exhaust, solar flares, Venus, Chernobyl reactor #4, the anger of the volcano goddess Pele, fresh fulgurites, or the boiling point of lead. Anything hotter than boiling water has ascended into the magisterium of the Divinely Hot, and nothing more detailed can be said of them by a mortal. If I were omnipotent, omniscient, & invulnerable, then I could put all those things in contact with each other and then watch which way the heat flows. But I am a human, so all I can say is that anything on that list could boil water.
Off the top of my head I can definitely sort these into tiers. I don’t know any numbers though other than 2700K for incandescent filaments and like 600F for self-cleaning ovens.
solar flares (these are made of plasma and go very fast, so they’re very hot) welding torches (hottest combustion temperatures, much above this everything is plasma) incandescent filaments, volcano, boiling point of lead, fighter jet exhaust (most things melt and glow white or yellow, normal combustion) campfires, Venus, self-cleaning ovens (most things don’t melt and glow reddish or not at all)
No idea where to put fulgerites or Chernobyl because I don’t know what happens to things there. But you can definitely make inferences like:
~everything melts in a welding torch, but incandescent filaments don’t melt because if they got close they would break. So welding torch > incandescent filaments
incandescent filaments > Venus because we sent cameras to Venus in the 1970s, the cameras didn’t immediately melt, and not everything was glowing bright yellow in the pictures
You can get a visceral understanding of high degrees of heat. You just need real-life experience with it. I’ve done some metalworking, a lot of which is delicate control of high temperatures. By looking at the black-body glow of the metal you’re working with, you can grok how hot it is. I know that annealing brass (just barely pink) is substantially cooler than melting silver solder (well into the red), or that steel gets soft (orange) well before it melts (white hot). I don’t know the actual numerical values of any of those.
I still have no feeling for temperatures between boiling water and the onset of glowing, though, so I don’t know whether cooking phenolic resin is hotter or colder than melting lead. Both of them are hotter than boiling water, but not hot enough to glow.
I wonder what other qualities or continuums are analogous to this? Hearing doesn’t seem to be the same in that unlike heat it scales up logarithmically (what is the scale between perceived temperature and the actual energy per part?). Nor does colour partly because we perceive colour through the combination of Red, Green (to which we are most sensitive) and Blue (to which we are least sensitive), although if you think about light as a narrow window of electromagnetic radiation then perhaps there is some comparison to be made between gamma rays and fight jet exhausts, and Terrestrial Radio signals to liquid nitrogen for example.
What about distance? I’m thinking in particularly about how in English use Deixis words like “here”, “there” (and in the past: “hither”, “thither”, and “yonder”) - I wonder if nomadic peoples have a more nuanced even if non-numeric standardized way of describing proximity which is very anthropic in measurement? “1,000 miles” is not a tangible distance to consider.
What’s interesting about those examples is the domestication of the Horse and the mass production of the motor vehicle have changed the (intuitive?) intelligibility of distance, perhaps in a way that is not comparable to our interpretation of heat? But also that both are measured in days which implies rest and sleep.
Would I somehow feel this problem less acutely if I had never been taught Fahrenheit, Celcius, or Kelvin; and instead been told everything in terms of gigabytes per nanojoule? I guess probably not. Inconvenient conversions are not preventing me from figuring out the relations and benchmarks I’m interested in.
In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.
But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I’m totally stuck.
It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you’re talking about campfires, self-cleaning ovens, welding torches, incandescent filaments, fighter jet exhaust, solar flares, Venus, Chernobyl reactor #4, the anger of the volcano goddess Pele, fresh fulgurites, or the boiling point of lead. Anything hotter than boiling water has ascended into the magisterium of the Divinely Hot, and nothing more detailed can be said of them by a mortal. If I were omnipotent, omniscient, & invulnerable, then I could put all those things in contact with each other and then watch which way the heat flows. But I am a human, so all I can say is that anything on that list could boil water.
Off the top of my head I can definitely sort these into tiers. I don’t know any numbers though other than 2700K for incandescent filaments and like 600F for self-cleaning ovens.
solar flares (these are made of plasma and go very fast, so they’re very hot)
welding torches (hottest combustion temperatures, much above this everything is plasma)
incandescent filaments, volcano, boiling point of lead, fighter jet exhaust (most things melt and glow white or yellow, normal combustion)
campfires, Venus, self-cleaning ovens (most things don’t melt and glow reddish or not at all)
No idea where to put fulgerites or Chernobyl because I don’t know what happens to things there. But you can definitely make inferences like:
~everything melts in a welding torch, but incandescent filaments don’t melt because if they got close they would break. So welding torch > incandescent filaments
incandescent filaments > Venus because we sent cameras to Venus in the 1970s, the cameras didn’t immediately melt, and not everything was glowing bright yellow in the pictures
You can get a visceral understanding of high degrees of heat. You just need real-life experience with it. I’ve done some metalworking, a lot of which is delicate control of high temperatures. By looking at the black-body glow of the metal you’re working with, you can grok how hot it is. I know that annealing brass (just barely pink) is substantially cooler than melting silver solder (well into the red), or that steel gets soft (orange) well before it melts (white hot). I don’t know the actual numerical values of any of those.
I still have no feeling for temperatures between boiling water and the onset of glowing, though, so I don’t know whether cooking phenolic resin is hotter or colder than melting lead. Both of them are hotter than boiling water, but not hot enough to glow.
Fire temperature can be computed from the fire’s color.
I wonder what other qualities or continuums are analogous to this? Hearing doesn’t seem to be the same in that unlike heat it scales up logarithmically (what is the scale between perceived temperature and the actual energy per part?). Nor does colour partly because we perceive colour through the combination of Red, Green (to which we are most sensitive) and Blue (to which we are least sensitive), although if you think about light as a narrow window of electromagnetic radiation then perhaps there is some comparison to be made between gamma rays and fight jet exhausts, and Terrestrial Radio signals to liquid nitrogen for example.
What about distance? I’m thinking in particularly about how in English use Deixis words like “here”, “there” (and in the past: “hither”, “thither”, and “yonder”) - I wonder if nomadic peoples have a more nuanced even if non-numeric standardized way of describing proximity which is very anthropic in measurement? “1,000 miles” is not a tangible distance to consider.
The imaginary nomad in my head would describe 1,000 miles as “sixteen days ride.” That‘s humanly comprehensible.
An American would say “Day and a half drive, if you’re not pushing it. You could do it in one day, if you’re in a hurry or have more than one driver.”
What’s interesting about those examples is the domestication of the Horse and the mass production of the motor vehicle have changed the (intuitive?) intelligibility of distance, perhaps in a way that is not comparable to our interpretation of heat? But also that both are measured in days which implies rest and sleep.
Would I somehow feel this problem less acutely if I had never been taught Fahrenheit, Celcius, or Kelvin; and instead been told everything in terms of gigabytes per nanojoule? I guess probably not. Inconvenient conversions are not preventing me from figuring out the relations and benchmarks I’m interested in.