Open thread, October 2011

MarkusRamikin

This thread is for discussing anything that doesn't seem to deserve its own post.

If the resulting discussion becomes impractical to continue here, it means the topic is a promising candidate for its own thread.

This thread is for discussing anything that doesn't seem to deserve its own post.

If the resulting discussion becomes impractical to continue here, it means the topic is a promising candidate for its own thread.

Was it possible for the ancient Greeks to discover that cold is the absence of heat?

Yes. The relevant experiment would be a study of how gases expand when heated, leading to the ideal gas law, which has a special case at absolute 0.

The special case distinguishes between cold being a real entity (and heat being neg-cold) and heat being a real entity (and cold being neg-heat); because it proves that heat has a minimum, and cold a maximum, rather than the other way around.

0JoshuaZ15y

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.

3Jack15y

I'm not confident they didn't know that. Cite?

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