Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Russell Jurgensen
Thursday, March 14, 2024
This picture was taken almost two weeks ago near Castle Rock, Washington. For a few hours it looked like a lot of snow. I didn’t feel like going outside to check the temperature, so I used the zoom feature on my phone to grab a picture of a thermometer hanging on a garage. That picture is added as an insert. It reads about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. It is hard to see but the thermometer has a high temperature indicator at about 100 degrees that must have been set last summer.
This got me to thinking about what temperature really indicates. We know what temperature feels like, but it is a little hard to actually define. If you don’t feel like geeking out, you can skip the next two paragraphs. With a web search I found a general description that temperature is a measurement of the kinetic energy in the air molecules as they move around. Evidently as they bump into things the molecules impart a little of their kinetic energy to the things they bump into like our skin. Meanwhile our skin has kinetic energy that gets transferred to the air molecules. If our skin has the same kinetic energy as the air, the energy transfer both directions is the same, and we don’t feel much. However, if there is net energy transfer, we feel warming or cooling effects.
Not only is energy transferred by bumping, but by electromagnetic radiation as infrared waves. What if there were no air around us? Our skin would rapidly lose energy as it emits electromagnetic waves, and it would feel freezing. Our skin depends on constant heat input from our surroundings.
It got me to thinking about when people interact with each other. If we were left completely alone with no other people, we would have a hard time surviving. Or if someone only took things from others and never gave, they would seem awfully cold. We might not realize how random people operate at various jobs and services that we depend on. As a society we depend on the people around us to keep living.
Let’s recognize our dependence on other people as we share our love and abilities every day.