Understanding Heat

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

@qda Look, let's not go down that road again. Like I said before, we should work to avoid the thread becoming toxin. Things got heated before between me and thejams; I do not wish others being pulled into something we already agreed to wash it off.

[qda]

3 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

@qda Look, let's not go down that road again. Like I said before, we should work to avoid the thread becoming toxin. Things got heated before between me and thejams; I do not wish others being pulled into something we already agreed to wash it off.

Well, I would have kindly corrected him, if only he didn't barged in with this attitude.
Anyway, all is forgiven and forgotten.

Cheers

[thejams]

5 hours ago, qda said:

First, you can't delete thermal energy (or, as it is called plain and simply, heat) IRL, you can just move it. ...

...Just to be clear, "as it is defined in physics", heat is an energy, not a transfer of energy, which are two rather different concepts. Being as smart as you are, you could have guessed it simply by the fact that the unit with which one measures heat, is the Joule (used also, for example, in electricity), the universal unit for measuring an amount of energy, and not an amount of energy transferred.

Heat is the thermal energy in transfer and even though it shares the same unit, Joule as any energy, it is not the same as the internal thermal energy.

I think you are mixing up amount of energy transferred, which is measured in Joules, and rate of energy transfer which is measured in J/s or W.

The definition of Joule itself is "the energy transferred to (or work done on) ..."

5 hours ago, qda said:

Never used, both in ONI and in real life. But hey, thanks for the enlightenment.

Just as in real life, specific heat capacity (the heat capacity per unit of mass) is used in ONI to determine the amount of energy (heat) that needs to be transferred to or from an object, to change it's temperature by 1°K for each gram of it's mass.

You're welcome.

[Trego]

Hey guys, I have a compromise.  In ONI, we continue to use heat, using 'heat' to refer to the transfer of thermal energy, and 'internal heat' to refer to the stored thermal energy inside an object.  This works perfectly fine within the confines of ONI and makes all our previous discussions about heat basically fine.  We all agree to remember that when we talk about the real world, we use heat for transferred energy, a process function, and perform a morphism where what we call 'internal heat' in ONI roughly corresponds to 'internal energy' , one of the two cardinal state functions of thermodynamics, in the real world.  That's it; that's all we have to do to both continue to only use heat in ONI, and to still be correct when we talk about real world thermodynamics.  Isn't that easy?  Also we have to remember that you can't naively calculate the internal energy in the real world by simply multiply the temperature in kelvins by the heat capacity, because the heat capacity function is an approximation which varies by condition of the object.  the internal energy in the real world is , from a given state to the standard state, and may be understood in a non-relativistic frame by the sum of the microscopic potentials .  .  We don't really have to remember all those formulas, we can just remember that the internal heat we talk about in ONI works differently than internal energy does in the real world, in that temperature in the real world is derived statistically and in ONI is defined relatively constantly.

(I took upper-div thermo decades ago so I'm a bit rusty, but you don't really have to be fresh up on it to realize that just like we don't worry too much about the ideal gas law in ONI because it's simply not simulated there, we shouldn't worry too much about real world thermodynamics in ONI because statistical thermodynamics in ONI, just like the ideal gas law, is simply not simulated.)

p.s. I don't find theJams appeal to the real world physics very convincing, obviously, but the one thing he seems to have hit on is that when we're creating and destroying mass all over the place, the utility of the 'internal heat' sum function starts to drop, as what we practically care about is indeed simply the transferred heat to our remaining colony.  If calculating this transferred heat alone happens to be more convenient or simpler, ignoring the 'internal heat' convolutions is a rational choice, if they're not needed to accomplish our thermal goals.  My experience is that they're often not.