Thermal Equilibrium Quotes

Heat is a universal solvent, melting out of things their power of resistance, and sucking away and removing their natural strength with its fiery exhalations so that they grow soft, and hence weak, under its glow.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.

The fall of a given weight from a height of around 365 meters corresponds to the heating of an equal weight of water from 0° to 1°.

The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years. Sooner or later we won’t be able to tell the carrots from the onions.

Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.

Note, however, that you cannot simply add temperatures the way you can add volumes or weights. Two people in bed, each with body temperatures of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, do not normally create a 197.2 degree under-the-cover oven.

Since we can produce all types of light by means of hot bodies, we can ascribe, to the radiation in thermal equilibrium with hot bodies, the temperature of these bodies, and thus every radiation, even that issuing from a phosphorescent body, has a certain temperature for every colour.

There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.

The laws of thermodynamic s are such that if the water is getting warmer - and I believe it is - the energy of the weather is going to go up.

Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way influenced by the presence of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere?

Heat energy of uniform temperature [is] the ultimate fate of all energy. The power of sunlight and coal, electric power, water power, winds and tides do the work of the world, and in the end all unite to hasten the merry molecular dance.

Trillions of years into the future, when all stars are gone...all parts of the cosmos will cool to the same temperature as the ever-cooling background. At that time, space travel will no longer provide refuge because even Hell will have frozen over. We may then declare that the universe has died-not with a bang, but with a whimper.

An Ant on a hot stove-lid runs faster than an Ant on a cold one. Who wouldn't?

Do not great Bodies conserve their heat the longest, their parts heating one another, and may not great dense and fix'd Bodies, when heated beyond a certain degree, emit Light so copiously, as by the Emission and Re-action of its Light, and the Reflexions and Refractions of its Rays within its Pores to grow still hotter, till it comes to a certain period of heat, such as is that of the Sun?

The spectral density of black body radiation ... represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.

Like I've always said, what's hot must go cold.

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.

Nature prefers the more probable states to the less probable because in nature processes take place in the direction of greater probability. Heat goes from a body at higher temperature to a body at lower temperature because the state of equal temperature distribution is more probable than a state of unequal temperature distribution.

The intense atom glows A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.

The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.

Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you would be perfectly comfortable.

A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.