IOP Education |Stories from physics booklet 6

Energy and thermal physics

By Richard Brock

iop.org
Stories from physics Stories from physics

Introduction Message from the author

Energy is a fundamental explanatory concept that physicists use to make sense of
This is the sixth booklet in our series. These stories of physicists and
the world. Yet, as Richard Feynman emphasised, energy is ‘a most abstract idea’.
engineers – and mathematicians and chemists - show that there is a human This abstraction means the concept can be one that students find hard to engage
aspect to each unit and scale, to each abstract idea and each word that with. I hope that the stories in this booklet provide some routes to introducing and
illustrating energy in the classroom.
represents a way of looking at the world.
We report studies of the energetics of fights between creatures in the Pleistocene
They are also the stories of how these ideas have changed over time. era, before asking how many people were required to build the pyramids. After
detouring through early cooling technology in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, you will read
Names are preserved as scientific units or physical principles, but they
about the power output of Norman water mills.
belonged to real people who worked to explain and understand the world in
Fast forward to Émilie du Châtelet’s contributions to research on energy and why she
which they lived. had to disguise herself as a man. Find out about Count Rumford’s ‘boring’
experiments and why he wore a white hat in winter. Discover how bleeding in the
Some of the ideas described may seem outdated, or elementary, but those tropics prompted an early proposal of the principle of conservation of energy.
judgements are only possible because of hindsight. Our current More recently, discover Einstein and Szilard’s collaborations on fridge design. Read
understanding of energy, and the representations we use in physics, are why Scott of the Antarctic should have paid more attention to his energy calculations
and how a soft drink limited Concorde’s ability to cruise at speed. Complement your
based on the work they did. The very words we use – calorie, working, reading with a cup of tea made to the British Standards’ guidance (BS 6008:1980).
horsepower – preserve their assumptions, discoveries and stories. We learn
I am grateful to the Institute of Physics for making this collection of the stories a
as much from their mistakes as their successes. reality. In particular, I want to thank Caroline Davis for managing the project and
editing the booklets, Ian Horsewell for his insightful comments, and Stuart Redfern
Once again, we would like to thank Richard for his work in bringing these for his wonderful illustrations.
stories to an eager audience of teachers, and are pleased to have been
able to help him to share them. So, let me tell you some stories from physics…

Charles Tracy
IOP Head of Education

Richard Brock

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Stories from physics Stories from physics

Energy When comparing fuels, it can be more useful to consider the amount of energy stored
per unit mass (the energy density) rather than the absolute magnitude of energy
Getting the measure of energy transfer. A comparison of the energy densities of different fuels highlights the potency
Energy is an abstract concept and it can be hard to get a feel for the quantity of of uranium:
energy transferred in different events. The table below gives the orders of magnitudes
of energy transferred by a range of events in the universe: Fuel Energy density (MJ/kg)
Uranium (in breeder reactor) 80,620,000
Event Energy transferred (J)
Hydrogen (compressed at 70 MPa) 142
Big Bang 1068
Liquefied petroleum gas 46
Typical supernova 1044
Jet fuel 43
Solar energy reaching the Earth annually 5 x 1024
Fat (animal/vegetable) 37
Krakatoa eruption 1018
Coal 24
Burning 1 L of petrol 3 x 107

Daily food intake of a human adult 2 x 107 Carbohydrates (including sugars) 17

Kinetic energy of a cricket ball hit for six 103 Protein 17

Work done by a human heart per beat 0.5 Wood 16

Work done in turning the page in a book 10-3 TNT 4.6

Work done in discharge of a single neuron 10-10 Lithium battery (non-rechargeable) 1.8

Typical energy of an electron in an atom 10-18 Excluding nuclear blasts, perhaps the most energetic human-created explosion was
Energy needed to break one bond in DNA 10-20 a test carried out by American scientists in 1987, codenamed Misty Picture. In
order to mimic the effect of a low yield nuclear weapon, the scientists detonated
4,685 tonnes of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil explosives at White Sands Missile
Range in New Mexico. The explosion is estimated to have had a yield of 33.4 TJ
(33.4 x 1012 J).

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Stories from physics Stories from physics

Human energy expenditure Negative calorie foods

A wonderfully detailed list of the energy expenditures of various activities has been Some diet regimes have suggested that dieters consume ‘negative calorie’ foods in
produced: order to lose weight. Theoretically, negative calorie foods require greater energy
Activity Energy expenditure expenditure in digestion than is gained from their consumption, resulting in a net
(kJ per hour per kg of energy deficit. Celery is a commonly cited example of such a food. A recent study of
body mass) celery consumption by bearded dragons suggests that the idea that celery is a
Talking or talking on the phone, reclining 4 negative calorie food is a myth, at least for these reptiles. It is reported that the
lizards retained at least 24% of the energy in the celery they consumed.
Sitting, knitting, sewing, light wrapping (presents) 6
Energy density of foods
Occupation, office work in general 6
Rather than simply comparing the absolute calorific value of foods, energy density
Studying, general, including reading and/or writing (sitting) 7.5 can be a useful measure. Feeling hungry is one of the challenges of dieting, so foods
which provide relatively few calories per unit mass – i.e. they have a low energy
Washing dishes 9
density - may provide a feeling of fullness with limited calorie consumption.
Shopping (non-grocery shopping, walking) 9
• Low energy density foods are defined as those which contain less than 2.5 kJ/g or
Playing snooker/pool 10 0.6 kcal/g. They include non-starchy fruits and vegetables.

Getting ready for bed 10 • High energy density foods contain 17-38 kJ/g or 4-9 kcal/g and include biscuits,
crisps and peanut butter.
Walking using crutches 17
• In general, fats have a higher energy density, at around 38 kJ/g or 9 kcal/g, than
Playing drums 17
protein or carbohydrate, both around 17 kJ/g or 4 kcal/g.
Table tennis, ping pong 17
• The World Cancer Research Fund has recommended that the mean energy density
Scrubbing floors on hands and knees 23 of a person’s diet should be 5.23 kJ/g or 1.25 kcal/g. The diets of subsistence
farmers in Gambia averaged 4.50 kJ/g or 1.08 kcal/g, excluding drinks. This
Grooming a horse 25
compared to 6.70 kJ/g or 1.6 kcal/g for Western diets. A study of Scottish diets
Carrying groceries upstairs 33 reported that individuals in the most deprived areas ate diets with higher energy
densities than those in the least deprived areas.
A police officer making an arrest 33
The environmental energy costs of food
Swimming, backstoke 33
Vegetarian diets have a significant environmental benefit in terms of the energy costs
Football, competitive 42 of production. Just 4% of the energy transferred from the fossil fuels used to produce
animal-based food typically becomes protein, but this measure is 46% for grains.
Swimming, crawl, fast 46

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The history of the concept of energy and work Leibniz – force dead or alive?
The word ‘energy’ originates from the Greek energhéia, a concept Aristotle linked with Leibniz disagreed with the Cartesian notion that the total ‘motion’ was conserved
the idea of hypothetical entities becoming real. It was applied by physicians until the and distinguished two concepts: vis viva (the living force), defined as mass times
1600s to the notion of a supposed irritant substance conveyed by nerves that velocity squared (twice the modern kinetic energy), and vis mortua (dead force)
stimulated action. which is somewhat related to the modern notion of potential energy. Leibniz derived
his definition of vis viva by considering the ‘force’ acquired by two falling bodies, one
Aspects of the concept of work done appear as early as 60AD in the writings of Hero of mass m dropped a distance 4h and another mass 4m which falls a distance h.
of Alexandria. Hero reported that if a weight were raised with a pulley system by the
exertion of a force less than the weight being lifted, the rope must be pulled with a Leibniz used the law of falling bodies to argue that the object with mass m reaches
speed greater than the speed with which the weight rises. double the velocity of the 4m object, because it falls four times the distance. As the
same ‘force’ is required to lift both bodies, the value of vis viva should be related to
Galileo and Descartes get the ball rolling Galileo Galilei mv2 not mv. Moreover, Leibniz argued that the quantity mass multiplied by velocity
Galileo, without explicitly discussing the squared was conserved.
concept of conservation of energy, hinted
at an understanding that certain kinds of A disagreement between followers of Leibniz and Descartes over the nature of vis
machines were impossible: viva occupied philosophers for over 50 years. English and French thinkers tended to
favour the notion that ‘living force’ was represented by mv, with Dutch, German and
… as if with their machines they Italian philosophers preferring Leibniz’s mv2 construction.
could cheat nature whose instinct
- nay, whose most firm constitution It is argued that Newton understood, and used mathematically, the concepts of the
- is that no resistance may be kinetic and potential energy in the context of objects in orbit, without having explicit
overcome by a force that is not terminology for the concepts.
more powerful than it.

Descartes’ writings also include a theologically inspired assertion that pre-empted

conservation laws:

God… in the beginning created matter along with motion and rest, and now,
through His ordinary concourse alone, conserves just as much motion and rest
in the whole of it [i.e., the material world] as He put there at that time.

In his 1664 Principia Philosophiae, Descartes proposed a number of (flawed) laws of

collisions that used the concept of quantity of motion, calculated as the product of
mass and undirected speed. Building on Descartes work, in 1668, John Wallis,
Christopher Wren and Christiaan Huygens presented work to the Royal Society in
which they argued that the direction of velocity was a significant aspect of the
quantity of motion.
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The history of the concept of energy and work continued Du Châtelet became the first woman to have a paper published by the Paris Academy.
Du Châtelet - inferior to no one She had developed a close personal and professional relationship with Voltaire with
A significant contribution to the debate about the nature of the concept of energy was whom she collaborated on scientific research. However, when he entered a paper on
made by Émilie du Châtelet, a French philosopher and scientist born in 1706. Du the nature of fire to the Academy’s essay competition in 1738, she disagreed with his
Châtelet had been brought up by a thesis and submitted her own rival paper. Neither won.
progressive father who encouraged his
In addition to her scientific pursuits, du Châtelet enjoyed gambling at cards, losing
daughter’s training in horse-riding and
84,000 livres (just over a million pounds in today’s money) in one evening. She
fencing alongside an academic education in
encountered significant prejudice throughout her life due to her gender. The German
mathematics, literature and science.
philosopher Kant wrote:
After an arranged marriage to a member of
A woman who… carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics, like
the nobility, du Châtelet became a mother
the Marquise du Châtelet, might as well even have a beard, for perhaps that
but resumed her mathematical studies
would express more obviously the mien of profundity for which she strives.
with a series of eminent tutors. At the
time, the Café Gradot in Paris was a She was unbowed and refused to be seen simply as a footnote to men’s lives, writing:
favourite venue for thinkers to meet and
Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a
debate but, when du Châtelet attempted
mere appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar, this star that
to follow a tutor into the café to continue
shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a
their discussion, she was ejected
whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all
because she was a woman. Undeterred,
that I do… I confess that I am inferior to no one.
du Châtelet had a man’s suit made and
returned a week later, in disguise, to engage Her final project was translating Newton’s Principia into French. Aged 43, du Châtelet
in the discussions. discovered she was pregnant and feared she would die before she completed the
translation. She increased her work schedule reporting:
One of du Châtelet’s most significant contributions to the energy debate was a critique
of an argument proposed by James Jurin, who supported Descartes’ model of ‘force’ as I get up at nine, sometimes at eight; I work till three; then I take my coffee; I
mv. She proposed a thought experiment in which a spring projects a ball forwards on resume work at four; at ten I stop to eat a morsel alone; I talk till midnight with
the deck of a boat. She pointed out that Jurin (and others) had neglected the recoiling M. de Voltaire, who comes to supper with me, and at midnight I go to work
motion of the boat. She asserted that the model of ‘force’ as mv, which had been again and keep on till five in the morning… I must do this… or lose the fruit of
supported from this mistaken assumption, should be replaced with the quantity my labours if I should die in child-bed.
1/2mv2 and proposed the conservation of total energy in addition to conservation of
Sadly, her fears turned out to be justified. Du Châtelet died six days after giving birth.
total momentum.

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The history of the concept of energy and work continued A fatal miscalculation
Newtonian treason An important factor in the failure of Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the South
Around 1720, the Dutch physicist Willem Gravesande set out to experimentally Pole was an error in estimating the energy expenditure of his men. Scott provided
resolve the controversy over whether vis viva was best represented as mv or mv2. rations of 4,400 calories a day when his men were expending on average 7,000
Gravesande dropped balls of different weight into a layer of clay and measured the calories hauling their equipment. The calculations Scott had based his rationing on
depth of the impressions they made. This led him to conclude that Leibniz’s were derived from men working at sea level and he made no correction for the
construction of mv2 was correct; a difficult conclusion as Newton, his idol and increased rates of respiration his men would experience at altitude. It is thought his
mentor, had championed the quantity of motion as mv. When it was argued that his team experienced a calorie deficit and lost around 1.5 kg of body mass per week. At
conclusions were ‘treason’ to the Newtonian cause, Gravesande replied: the time of his death, it is estimated that Scott had lost 40% of his body mass.
“Real Newtonians don’t follow a person but a method.” Scott’s team had packed rations with a high proportion of protein (29%), for example
Gravesande is also notable for devising the common classroom experiment in which pemmican (a food made from dried meat, fat and berries) and biscuits, but it is now
a brass sphere can be passed through a brass ring at room temperature but fails to argued that the slow plodding motion of sledge hauling is better supported by high-fat
fit after the sphere has been heated. rations. A typical contemporary Antarctic ration contains 57% fat and only 8%
protein.
Resolution
Some historians of science argue that the vis viva debate was finally resolved by Do biscuits boost brain function?
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert in 1743. He pointed out that the controversy was “un When engaged in a difficult task,
dispute de mots”, a dispute over words, rather than a disagreement of physical you may have justified the
models. He showed that it was possible to use both conservation of mv and mv2 in consumption of a sweet treat
the same system. based on the belief that the
sugar will help you concentrate.
In 1807, Thomas Young was the first person to use the modern sense of the word
A body of research has
‘energy’ for the quantity of mass multiplied by velocity squared. William Thompson,
examined whether the
who later became Lord Kelvin, is credited with introducing the concept of kinetic
consumption of carbohydrates,
energy in 1849. We now associate the concept of an object’s kinetic energy with
such as glucose, can boost mental
the quantity of one half of its mass multiplied by its velocity squared.
function. A review of the literature
concluded that there is a consensus that for
people with poorly regulated blood sugar who are
undertaking cognitively challenging tasks, the consumption of
glucose may indeed boost performance. Sadly, the evidence is inconclusive as to
whether consuming additional glucose boosts mental function in all cases.

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Stories from physics Stories from physics

The unsettling James Joule The paddle-wheel experiment

James Joule, born in 1818, came from a long-established brewing family and the William Thompson (later, Lord Kelvin) remarked to his brother that Joule’s ideas “have
Joule family brewery is still in operation today in Market Drayton. a slight tendency to unsettle one’s mind”. A good example is Joule’s well-known
paddle-wheel experiment. Although intuitive today, it was the first method which
Firearms and eyebrows demonstrated work done mechanically is equivalent to work done by heating.
Joule had a laid-back approach to safety in his experimentation. To investigate an
echo from Scafell, a mountain in the Lake District, he loaded his father’s pistol with a The paddle-wheel experiment seems to be straightforward, but attempts to replicate
triple charge of powder. On firing, the recoil blew the weapon into a lake. it from Joule’s methodological description highlight his prowess as an experimental
scientist. Joule’s instructions require an experimenter to use pulleys to raise and then
drop two 13 kg masses 20 times within a 35-minute period — a feat which requires
considerable muscle strength. To add to the challenge, between each winding, the
experimenter must pause to take temperature readings from behind a wooden shield
to prevent heating by their body affecting the experiment.

A present-day replicator of the experiment concluded with exasperation: “Having

worked to replicate Joule’s experiments with his apparatus, I find it more than a little
irritating that he states, without elaborating, that ‘the method of experimenting was
simply as follows’.”

Later years
In 1858, Joule was returning home from London on the Scotch Express when, near
Nuneaton, the train hit a cow that had wandered onto the rails. The carriages toward
the front of the train were derailed in the collision and three passengers were killed.
Though Joule was unharmed, he reported his shock at seeing the locomotive crew
The experience did not instil a cautious approach to experimentation in the young calmly eating sandwiches in the aftermath of the crash. The accident made him
scientist — in further experiments with firearms, Joule is reported to have blown his anxious about train travel and it is claimed that he turned down the opportunity to be
eyebrows off. It was not only his own safety that was threatened by his renominated to the Council of the Royal Society to avoid further trips to London.
experimentation. He tested the effects of a Leyden jar on a servant girl, asking her to
report the sensations she experienced whilst increasing the intensity of the shocks Despite his many scientific achievements Joule was a modest man. He commented to
until she lost consciousness. Though it is often reported that Joule took a thermometer his brother: “I believe I have done two or three little things, but nothing to make a fuss
with him on his honeymoon, and made measurements of the temperature of a about.” His gravestone, in Sale, Greater Manchester, has the number 772.55 engraved
waterfall, Joule’s biographer reports that the story only appeared 35 years after the on it, the magnitude of work required to heat a pound of water by one degree in
alleged event and is likely a fable. foot-pounds (an imperial unit of work whereby 1 foot pound is equivalent to 1.4 J).

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Revolutionary Rumford Rumford’s inventions and underwear

Another proposer of the principle of conservation of energy, Benjamin Thompson Whilst living in Paris, Rumford gained a reputation for
(later, Count Rumford), was born in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1753. Rumford left eccentricity. During the winter he wore a white hat
school at 13 and moved between a number of jobs, being apprenticed first to a and coat to better reflect hypothetical rays of cold
merchant, then a shopkeeper and finally a doctor. During this time, Rumford began to known at the time as frigorific rays.
carry out experiments on heat transfer but his unstable employment situation Amongst other inventions, Rumford designed:
prevented focused work. a drip coffee maker, the first enclosed kitchen
His luck changed when he met and married Sarah Rolfe, a wealthy and socially range, and Rumford soup, a broth which was
well-connected heiress. Through his wife’s connections, Rumford was appointed as a intended to improve the diet of the masses.
major in the New Hampshire Militia. His new status led him to support the loyalist Due to his investigation of the thermal
colonists in the American Revolutionary War and he was twice charged with spying for properties of various materials, Rumford is
the British against the revolutionary Americans. Faced with these charges, Rumford credited with the invention of thermal
fled from America, first to London and then to Bavaria, leaving his wife and daughter, underwear.
whom he would never see again. Rumford’s charm allowed him to secure the position Remarriage and legacy
of aide-de-camp to the prince-elector of Bavaria and he was able to resume his In addition to his scientific works, Rumford
experiments on energy. established workhouses for the poor, created
Boring cannons the Englischer Garten in Munich and instigated the cultivation of the potato to
Whilst in Munich, he oversaw the manufacture of cannons and observed that a Bavaria. For these services, in 1791, he was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire.
blunted borer made the cannon’s brass casing hot enough to boil water. The In the final years of his life, together with Joseph Banks, Rumford founded the Royal
contemporary theory of heat transfer suggested that the process of boring released a Institution in 1799 and appointed Humphry Davy as its first lecturer.
fluid, called ‘caloric’, from the metal which entered the water, heating it up. Rumford Rumford’s story has a curious twist. When he moved to Paris, he began an affair, and
disagreed with this interpretation and argued that the metal did not contain a fluid later married, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier. A French chemist herself, she had been
form of heat, but that the motion of drilling generated heat. We would now say that married to the executed scientist Lavoisier who had proposed the caloric theory which
the drilling motion caused heating of the metal — energy is transferred to a thermal Rumford had rejected.
store by mechanical working.

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Stories from physics Stories from physics

Black’s curious and puzzling thing Negative heat capacities

Joseph Black, who became professor of medicine and chemistry at Glasgow It seems intuitive that, when energy is added to a system, its temperature will rise.
University, was born in Bordeaux in 1728 to a family of wine merchants. Black was Hence, the notion of negative heat capacities seems an impossibility. However,
interested in changes of state and introduced the term latent heat to refer to energy astrophysicists have argued that a star, or cluster of stars, can cool down when
that appeared hidden in the process of melting but would reappear in freezing. He energy is added. Virial theorem describes the mean total kinetic energy of a system
contrasted latent heat with sensible heat, the energy that, when transferred, results in of particles bound by a potential over time. When applied to the cores of main
the changes in temperature of materials between changes of state. In a collection of sequence stars, as hydrogen is converted to helium by fusion, the mean molecular
lectures published in 1807, after his death, Black noted a curious effect that occurred mass of particles increases and the core collapses. This contraction, according to
when an equal of amount of ice and 80°C water were mixed together (the units have virial theorem, results in a decrease in potential energy and an increase in thermal
been converted from Fahrenheit in the original text): energy. Hence the core’s temperature increases as its energy falls, suggesting a
negative heat capacity. A similar argument holds for clusters of atoms with negative
…the result was that the fluid was no hotter than water just ready to freeze.
heat capacities observed in clusters of sodium atoms.
Nay, if a little sea salt be added to the water and it be heated only to 74 or
77°C, we shall produce a fluid sensibly colder than the ice was in the How many people does it take to build a pyramid?
beginning, which has appeared a curious and puzzling thing to those
The Greek historian Herodotus reported that, once the site had been prepared, it took
unacquainted with the general fact.
100,000 men twenty years to build the Great Pyramid. A professor of physics has
Black observed that different quantities of substances needed differing amounts of analysed whether this claim is realistic and estimates that the total work required to
energy transferred to them to raise their temperatures by the same amount and construct the Great Pyramid is around 1.3x1013 J. Assuming that one person could do
coined the term specific heat. His research was instrumental in the separation of the 150 kcal (628 kJ) of work on the pyramid per day, the academic argued that the work
concepts of ‘heat’ and ‘temperature’. could be completed by only 5,700 people over 10 years.

Black is also credited with discovering that, when heated, magnesium carbonate
releases a gas, which he labelled ‘fixed air’ but was later renamed ‘carbon dioxide’ by
Lavoisier.

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Why one horsepower is more than the power of one horse

The horsepower unit derives from a marketing gimmick devised by James Watt. When
attempting to sell his newly invented steam engine in the 1770s, Watt realised that
many of his customers would use the machine to replace horses, so he set out to
measure the power delivered by a horse.
He set two heavy dray horses to pull a 100 lb (45kg) mass from the bottom of a well
and found they could achieve the task by walking comfortably at 2.5 miles an hour.
Watt then added an extra 50% to the calculation to account for work done in
overcoming friction and defined 1 horsepower as the power needed to lift 150
pounds (68 kg) out of a 220 foot (67 m) deep well in one minute.
It has been claimed that Watt deliberately overestimated the power output of a horse
to ensure that his steam engines performed better than the horses they replaced.
Whilst the peak mechanical power of a single horse can reach up to 15 horsepower, it
is estimated that a typical horse can only sustain an output of 1 horsepower (746 W)
for three hours and, if working for an eight-hour day, a horse might output only three
quarters of one horsepower. Researchers have calculated the average power output
of various animals (as a rough guide, a healthy animal can pull 10-15% of its weight
for a period of four hours):

Animal Average Mass Approximate Average speed Power (W)

(kg) force exerted (N) (m/s)
Ox 500 - 900 600 - 800 0.56 - 0.83 560

Cow 400 - 600 500 - 600 0.70 340

Water buffalo 400 - 900 500 - 800 0.8 - 0.9 560

Horse 400 - 700 600 - 800 1.0 750

Mule 350 - 500 500 - 600 0.9 - 1.0 520

Donkey 150 - 300 300 - 400 0.70 260

Camel 450 - 500 400 - 500 1.1 500

Adult human 60 - 90 300 0.28 75

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What Watt did next Energy and exercise

Despite his financial success, Watt was not a natural businessman and he wrote in • During a marathon, a typical runner transfers around 100 J during each foot strike
a letter: with the ground, of which around 35 J is transferred to the elastic store of the
I would rather face a loaded cannon than settle an account or make a Achilles tendon. A good running track can return an additional 12 J per step and
bargain. In short I find myself out of my sphere when I have anything to do increase running speeds by approximately 2%. Running tracks are designed to have
with mankind; it is enough for an engineer to force Nature, and to bear the a natural frequency of around 2 Hz to maximise energy transfer.
vexation of her getting the better of him. • Much of the energetic benefit of swimming for losing weight may be due to thermal
transfer from the body rather than the work done in moving the body forward. An
These business difficulties inspired one of his lesser-known inventions. With his
estimate of the energy transferred by a 65 kg swimmer in a pool at 27°C concluded
commercial partner, Watt had built a thriving company that supplied steam-driven
that around 2 kJ/min of work is done propelling the swimmer forwards but ten times
pumps to mines. However, with the company’s success, the volume of paperwork
that amount, about 20 kJ/min, will be thermally conducted from the body. The author
he was faced with increased and Watt struggled to find suitable clerks to copy
of the paper concludes, “This fact can be utilised by overweight persons to burn their
documents. With Joseph Black (see above), Watt invented a novel system to copy
extra fats [sic] even by just sitting in the water with their head above the surface.”
documents. The pair developed a gelatinous ink which was used to write the first
version of a document. The document was dampened and pressed against another • By modelling the human body as a series of segments, a group of students
thin sheet by passing the two documents between two rollers. The copy was only calculated that the energy transferred by the upward motion of a press-up is around
legible if read through the back of the copied sheet to overcome the mirroring 342 J for the average male.
produced by the copying process. Watt patented the device and, in the first year
after in went on sale, sold 200 of the copiers, including a number to Thomas Historic and pre-historic energy use
Jefferson. Later in his career, Watt worked on a device for copying sculptures using A paper has estimated the power output of a single Norman water mill as around 1.3
a system of parallel, hinged arms. He never completed the design but, 20 years kW and, using the number of mills listed in the Doomsday Book of 1086, calculated
after Watt’s attempt, the sculptor Benjamin Cheverton patented a working device the total power output of Norman millers to be around 7.8 MW.
based on Watt’s idea.
A researcher at the University
A lot of bottle of Leeds has produced a
A paper by a team of forensic pathologists calculated the energy required to break series of estimates for the
beer bottles in order to determine whether they were capable of fracturing a human energies involved in fights
skull. They determined that full bottles were broken by 30 J of work done whereas between pre-historic
empty bottles shattered by a transfer of around 40 J (based on sample of six creatures. It is estimated that
bottles). The breaking energies were calculated by dropping a 1 kg steel ball onto a tail blow by a Doedicurus, a
the bottles in a materials’ testing drop tower. The authors report that heavily armoured relative of
electrohydraulic experiments with human cadavers had found that skull fractures the armadillo, could transfer
occurred in different regions of the skull at energies between 14.1 J and 68.5 J. around 2.5 kJ.
They conclude that beer bottles may act as formidable weapons.

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Why birds should avoid solar furnaces The legend of the boiling river
The world’s largest solar furnace, in Odeillo in the French Pyrenees, was built in 1968. For hundreds of years, legends spoke of a boiling river in the Amazonian jungle.
The furnace could, when newly constructed, concentrate solar power by a factor of In 2011, geoscientist Andrés Ruzo rediscovered and began studying the river.
16,000, but this has decreased to a multiplier of around 9,500 as temperature It is more than 650 km from the nearest active volcano yet the average
variation has moved the mirrors out of alignment. It can reach temperatures of temperature of the water is 86°C. At 25 m wide and 6 m deep in
3,500°C and is used for testing materials, including heat shields for spacecraft. places, it runs at high temperatures for a distance of over 6 km.
Although its ancient name is “Shanay-Timpishka”, roughly
Concerns have been raised about a solar thermal power plant in the Mohave Desert
translating to “boiled with the heat of the Sun”, it
because the plant had been igniting birds that flew over the facility. Federal biologists
is heated by hot springs powered by
estimated that as many as 6,000 birds may have been incinerated by the Ivanpah
geological fault lines.
Solar Plant every year. The plant consists of a 14 km2 array of mirrors which follow
the Sun, focussing light onto three 40-storey tall towers. Located on a migratory
route, the Pacific Flyway, birds approach the towers to eat insects attracted by the
focused beams of light. In response to concerns about the bird deaths, a number of
operational adjustments were suggested including clearing land and covering ponds
around the plant to make it a less attractive roosting site. Since changes were
introduced, the avian mortality rate at the facility has been significantly reduced.

The Mpemba effect

Chilling with Einstein
That hot water freezes quicker than cool water had been noted by many observers
Before becoming a professor of physics, Albert Einstein worked as a patent clerk.
including Aristotle, Bacon and Descartes. However, the effect has come to be named
Familiar with the process, he submitted a number of his own patents including a
after the schoolboy who brought the phenomenon back to the attention of scientists.
camera that self-adjusts to the ambient light level and an electromagnetic sound
In the 1960s, Erasto Mpemba, then a secondary school student in Tanzania, was
reproduction device. A number of his patents were related to refrigeration, a project
making ice cream and noted that boiled milk placed in the freezer froze faster than
on which he collaborated with nuclear physicist Leo Szilard. In the 1920s, Szilard
milk at room temperature. He approached his science teacher who said he must
was a frequent visitor to Einstein’s home. One day, after he had read a report of a
have been confused and mocked his answers in class, describing his ideas as
family who had been killed by the toxic gases leaking from their refrigerator, Einstein
‘Mpemba physics’. When a professor from a local university visited his school,
commented to Szilard that, “There must be a better way.” The two physicists
Mpemba raised the issue. The scientist asked a technician to confirm the result and
devised and patented multiple designs for new refrigerators based on principles
the academic and Mpemba published a co-authored paper on the effect.
including absorption, diffusion and electromagnetism. The Swedish company AB
This counter-intuitive result has led to the publication of several papers on the Electrolux bought the patent for the absorption refrigerator for $750 and
phenomenon. There is an on-going debate about the causes of the Mpemba effect. subsequently the diffusion design, though never developed either appliance.
Some researchers argue that the properties of hydrogen bonds explain the Einstein and Szilard also collaborated on the design of an electromagnetic pump,
phenomenon, whilst others claim that the effect is merely an artefact of experimental which they assumed would be silent. Instead, due to cavitation (the formation of
technique. bubbles) in the fluid, contemporaries reported the pump “howled like a jackal”.

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Kelvin’s achievements Kelvin made use of an innovative questioning technique in his lectures. He wrote the
William Thomson, who would later become Lord Kelvin, was a precocious student. At names of his students onto cards and sorted them into a box divided into three
the age of 16, he published his first paper, a development of ideas in a paper by sections:
Fourier. He holds the record for being both the youngest and oldest member of 1) purgatory (for those who had yet to be questioned)
Glasgow University - when he was 10 years old, Kelvin participated in a programme
for able primary school students at the university and was a member of faculty there 2) heaven (for those who had answered correctly)
until he was 75. Kelvin studied at Cambridge University, founded the Cambridge 3) hell (reserved for students who had answered a question incorrectly and
Musical Society and spent two hours a day rowing. Though he finished second in his needed to be retested).
year in his final exams, a story reports that one of his examiners remarked to
another, “You and I are just about fit to mend his pens.”

After graduating, Thompson spent a year in Paris, before being appointed a full
professor at the University of Glasgow at the age of 22. One of Kelvin’s most
significant projects was his contribution to the laying of Atlantic telegraph cables, for
which he received a knighthood. He invented the mirror galvanometer, the
electrostatic syphon recorder, a device for recording telegraphic Morse code
messages that pre-empted the invention of the inkjet printer, and a machine for
predicting tides (now housed in London’s Science Museum).

In 1867, Peter Guthrie Tate gave a demonstration of the strange behaviour of smoke
rings in his Edinburgh laboratory. He showed how, if two rings travelled along the
Kelvin’s question box now forms part of the collection of the Hunterian Museum.
same axis, the leading ring slowed, expanded and the pursuing ring accelerated and
contracted, passing through the other. Kelvin was greatly influenced by this Many teachers will empathise with another of Kelvin’s quirks. After two successive
demonstration and developed a vortex model of the atom, going on to argue that the lectures in which he could not find a single suitable piece of chalk, Kelvin ordered
Sun gained energy from the action of a vortex of comets circling it. his assistant to have a hundred pieces ready for his next lecture. His assistant
dutifully set out a hundred pieces of chalk along a 5 m window ledge. At the start of
his next lecture, Kelvin counted the pieces of chalk and congratulated his assistant
to the applause of his audience.

Kelvin’s scientific thinking sometimes spilled over into his personal life. Over lunch
one day, his wife suggested a walk and Kelvin is said to have replied: “At what time
does the dissipation of energy begin?”

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In his lifetime, Kelvin published 661 scientific papers and filed 75 patents. Despite Musical thermodynamics
his great successes he made a number of assertions that proved to be incorrect. He Flanders and Swan wrote a song about the first and second laws of thermodynamics
is said to have remarked that, “X-rays will prove to be a hoax” and famously that contains the verses:
underestimated the age of the Earth to be only somewhere between 20 and 400
million years. Rutherford reported being troubled by the prospect of giving a speech You can’t pass heat from a cooler to a hotter.
at the Royal Institution when Lord Kelvin was part of the audience because of their Try if you like, you far better notter,
disagreement over the age of the Earth. Fortunately, a conflict was avoided: ‘cause the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler,
‘cause the hotter body’s heat will pass to the cooler.
To my relief; Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I
saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and cock a baleful glance at me! Then a Heat is work and work’s a curse
sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the And all the heat in the universe
earth, provided no new source was discovered. That prophetic utterance Is gonna cool down
refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold! The old boy Because it can’t increase.
beamed upon me.
The Yarkovsky Effect
Kelvin received 21 honorary degrees from universities around the world, was The differential heating of the sides of an asteroid by sunlight can lead to the
awarded the Legion of Honour, Grand Officer by France, the Order of the First Class exertion of a small thrust force, a phenomenon known as the Yarkovsky effect. In
of the Sacred Treasure of Japan and was made a Knight of the Prussian Order Pour September 2016, NASA launched a spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, to intercept and
le Mérite. collect samples from the asteroid Bennu. It successfully landed on the asteroid in
The thermodynamics of wet pants October 2020. In addition to collecting a sample of the asteroid and returning it to
Earth, OSIRIS-REx will investigate the Yarkovsky effect on Bennu in order to develop
An unusual piece of thermodynamics research is presented
potential techniques to deflect asteroids that are on a collision course with the
in a paper: Impact of wet underwear on thermoregulatory
Earth.
responses and thermal comfort in the cold. Academics
recruited eight male volunteers who were willing to wear wet
underwear in a climate-controlled space whilst having their
skin and rectal temperatures monitored for an
hour. Every ten minutes, the volunteers
completed a questionnaire reporting how
much they were shivering and sweating.
The researchers, unsurprisingly,
concluded that men with wet underwear felt colder and less comfortable than men
with dry underwear. They report that the construction of underwear has an effect on
the rate of evaporation and hence cooling, and that the thickness of the underwear
has a more significant effect on thermal comfort than the material it is made from.

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A brief history of temperature During the 17th and 18th centuries, temperature measurement was complicated by
It is recorded that both Philo of Byzantium and Hero of Alexandria carried out the existence of at least 35 different temperature scales. Robert Boyle complained
experiments using thermoscopes, tubes filled with liquids without scales marked on that instruments could only provide relative measurements and that “we cannot
them, as a crude temperature probes. For example, Philo constructed a device communicate the idea of any such degree to another person”. Boyle entered into a
consisting of a hollow lead sphere, to which a curved U-shaped tube was connected. discussion of the nature of the primum frigidum, a superlatively cold body that was
The free end of the tube was placed under water and bubbles were detected when supposed to exist by some philosophers and Boyle described as “…some body or
the sphere was placed in the Sun. other, that is of its own nature supremely cold, and, by participation of which all
other bodies obtain that quality”. Early thinkers had associated the primum frigidum
with different elements. Boyle found none of their arguments satisfactory. For
example, he critiqued Plutarch for associating the primum frigidum with earth
because, he argued, it is the cold air that causes the ground to freeze, and he
rejected the notion that water was the ideally cold element, because the ocean
depths do not freeze. Ultimately, Boyle rejected the concept of a primum frigidum as
an ‘unwarrantable conceit’.

Dalton described a ‘natural zero of temperature’ which exhibited an ‘absolute

privation of heat’ and proposed it occurred at 6,000° below the freezing point of
water. Both Laplace and Lavoisier calculated numerical estimates for absolute zero
in the range of -600°C to -14,000°C. In an 1848 paper, Kelvin’s initially proposed
temperature scale had no zero point. He argued the scale should go down to ‘infinite
cold’ and, though he was aware of the zero volume of gases at -273°C, assumed
The Venetian physician Santorio Santorre is credited with the first mention in print of
that the result was not physically meaningful.
the liquid-in-glass thermometer in 1612, even though Galileo’s experiments
preceded it. After writing his 1848 paper, Kelvin read Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, the
seminal work by Sadi Carnot, the French military engineer and physicist. By contrast
Though it didn’t catch on, Newton developed his own temperature scale. He
with its eventual importance, Carnot’s writing had been ignored by scientists for 25
constructed a thermometer using linseed oil and set the zero of his scale to be ‘the
years, but caused Kelvin to realise that an ideal heat engine’s efficiency would
heat of air in winter at which water begins to freeze’ and defined 12 as ‘the greatest
approach a hundred percent as the temperature approached -273°C. To avoid a
heat which a thermometer takes up when in contact with the human body’. On this
violation of the principle of conservation of energy, in 1852, he revised his
scale, Newton reported that the “heat of iron… which is shining as much as it can”
temperature scale to include a zero of temperature.
registered a value of 192.

The Swedish professor, Anders Celsius, developed his eponymous scale in 1742 but,
though the scale was divided into the familiar 100 units, it was initially inverted so
the boiling point of water was at 0°C and freezing at 100°C. The direction of the
scale was switched by the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus.

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The bloody principle of conservation of energy The cat who wrote a paper
The principle of conservation of energy seems to have been developed by a number A cat has appeared as the co-author of a paper on low temperature physics
of scientists working independently around the same time. One of the earliest (Two-, three-, and four-atom
statements was proposed by a German doctor, Julius Robert Mayer, who served as a exchange effects in bcc He 3 in the
ship’s physician in the tropics. journal, Physical Review Letters).
The paper’s first author, Jack
Mayer noted that venous (deoxygenated) blood in the tropics appeared to be Hetherington, reports that though
unusually red and he hypothesised that someone living in a hot region required less he was the only author of the
oxygen than a person in a cooler climate. This train of thought led the doctor to paper, he had accidently written
consider the relationship between the consumption of food and bodily exertion. Using the article using the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’. Rather than rewriting the paper, he
the term ‘force’ as an explanatory principle for phenomena such as growth and added the name of his cat, Chester, used the initials of its species name, Felis
motion in humans, in 1841 Mayer formulated a conservation statement: domesticus, and the name of the cat’s father, Willard, as its surname to give the
Forces, like matter, are quantitatively invariable… motion, heat and… co-author: FDC Willard.
electricity are phenomena which can be explained by a single force… and can
be transformed into one another in accordance with definite laws. Motion is Burning the toast
transformed into heat by being neutralised by an opposite motion.
It is challenging to toast bread to
However, his idea received little attention at the time, perhaps because he was forced the perfect colour because of
to self-publish some of his work. thermal runaway: as the surface
of the bread darkens it absorbs
Tragically for Mayer, at the same time as the scientific community showed indifference more thermal radiation so its
to his work, he lost three of his children and he attempted suicide by jumping from a temperature rises faster and the
window, leaving him permanently lame. He was admitted to a mental asylum for a blackening process accelerates.
time, but after leaving, Mayer found that his scientific reputation had flourished and A more serious but related effect
he continued to work as a physician till his death in 1878. occurs as highly reflective white
ice sheets melt, decreasing the net
reflectivity of the Earth’s surface
and accelerating global warming. In reverse, this phenomenon can be used to make
urban environments more comfortable. As part of the city’s urban cooling agenda, a
pilot programme in Los Angeles has painted some normally dark-coloured
pavements with a white, reflective paint. The paint led to a decrease in pavement
surface temperatures by up to 6°C.

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The first fridges Using cannon balls to estimate the age of the Earth
There is evidence that, in the Egyptian Old Kingdom around 2500 BC, and as early as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a naturalist and mathematician, provided
3000 BC in India, evaporative cooling technology was used to cool liquids. To achieve an early estimate of the age of the Earth by observing cooling cannon balls. In a
the cooling effect, a porous earthenware pot with a narrow neck was filled with water. 1775 work, the Frenchman describes making a
Water seeped through the porous earthenware walls of the container and evaporated, number of iron spheres of various diameters
cooling the water remaining inside. An evaporative cooler’s efficiency is dependent on and heating them till they were white hot.
the humidity of the air — the theoretical maximum change in temperature possible is He recorded the time taken to reach two
equal to the difference in reading between a wet and dry bulb thermometer. points: a temperature when they
could be held comfortably and
Before the development of electric refrigerators, Australians made use of ‘Coolgardie
room temperature. Buffon argued
safes’. The devices, invented in the Coolgardie gold mines in Western Australia,
that the time taken to reach the
consist of a cupboard made from metal mesh with the walls lined with hessian.
two temperatures was
A container on top of the device kept the hessian damp via a link pipe. As water
proportional to the balls’ diameter
evaporates from the hessian, it cools the contents of the ‘safe’ and draws water down
and estimated that it would have
from the tank via the pipe. An evaporative cooler can extend the shell-life of tomatoes
taken the Earth “ninety-six
from 2 to 20 days.
thousand and six hundred seventy
Recognised as one of Junior Chamber International’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons years and one hundred and
of the World in 2010, Emily Cummins is an inventor and entrepreneur from Leeds. thirty-two days” to reach room
Emily reports that since her grandfather first handed her a hammer at the age of four, temperature. Buffon’s estimate
she was inspired to create. During her degree she invented a sustainable fridge that preceded Kelvin’s famous erroneous estimate of the age of the Earth (see end of
uses dirty water to cool food by evaporation. Her cylindrical fridges are now used Kelvin’s achievements on page 28) via a similar method.
across southern Africa.
The stack effect
Bacon’s fatal experiment The stack effect is a phenomenon that occurs in tall buildings. In hot weather, lower
A story reported to John Aubery by Thomas Hobbes claims that Francis Bacon died density warm air rises and escapes through windows or cracks at the top of the
whilst carrying out research on the preservation of food. According to the story, building, creating an area of relatively low pressure at the bottom of the building in
Bacon, on seeing some snow on the ground, got the idea that it could be used to comparison to the outside. The pressure differential causes air to be drawn into the
preserve meat, in a similar way to salt. He bought a hen, removed its viscera and base of the building through cracks and holes. The stack effect can lead to the
stuffed it with snow. It is reported that the exposure caused him to fall ill and he died exertion of strong forces on conventional doors, hence, most high-rise buildings have
a few days later. revolving or double doors to mitigate against the effect. The stack effect can be
observed on buildings that are being renovated and covered in sheeting. In hot
weather, tarpaulins tend to be drawn in at the bottom of the building and pushed out
at the top. The direction of the effect is reversed in cold weather.

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The British Standard cup of tea It’s getting hot in here!

British Standards (BS), the national standards body which produces a range of Passengers who use the deep lines on the London Underground in hot weather will
different technical specifications for products and services, has produced a standard have experienced how uncomfortable the trains can become. When London’s
for making a cup of tea. Published in 1980, BS 6008:1980 refers to the “Method for underground railway was first constructed in the 1800s, it was marketed as one of
preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests”. The standard recommends the the coolest places to be in hot weather. Since then, however, temperatures have
use of a pot of “…white porcelain or glazed earthenware, with its edge partly been rising.
serrated… and provided with a lid”. The pot should be filled with freshly boiled water In recent years, passengers on the Underground system have experienced a mean
to within 4-6 mm of the rim and the tea should be brewed for six minutes. When temperature of 11°C above the ambient temperature, with some areas considerably
preparing tea with milk, the guidance suggests tea is added to the serving vessel hotter still. In 2019, The Independent newspaper reported that the Central Line had
after the milk, to avoid scalding the milk. Though the writers avoid controversy by reached temperatures of over 36°C.
adding the caveat: “unless this procedure is contrary to the normal practice in the
organisation concerned”. The writers counsel that, “If the milk is added afterwards, When the Underground’s tunnels
experience has shown that the best results are obtained when the temperature of were originally dug, the surrounding
the liquor is in the range 65 to 80°C when the milk is added.” clay was relatively cool and acted
as a heat sink – in the 1900s the
temperature of the clay was around
14°C. Since then, energy
transferred by trains (mainly from
braking) has been absorbed by the
clay and currently the ground
surrounding the tunnels is at an
average temperature of 20 – 25°C.
The Underground’s designers had not anticipated this problem and the system
currently has inadequate ventilation to dissipate heat. Whilst making changes to the
deep and narrow existing tunnels is challenging, engineers have begun to consider
creative solutions, including increasing train coasting time and developing a system to
recapture energy during deceleration. The new Crossrail network’s engineers have
addressed the problem by using a system in which cold air is blown over a train’s
traction and braking systems whilst the train is in a station and the hot air is vented
along the underside of the platform.

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Reflecting on heat You’re hot and you’re cold

Marc-Auguste Pictet was a Swiss editor of the Bibliothèque Britannique, a Typically, for everyday objects, a single point on the object might be expected to be
publication that shared scientific knowledge developed in Great Britain with a at a single temperature. However, research by physicists at the University of Exeter
continental audience. In addition to his journalism, Pictet carried out his own suggests that, for small objects, the situation might be more complicated.
scientific studies. In one experiment, the report of which was published in 1790, he
In the 1930s, Heisenberg and Bohr applied the uncertainty principle to the
arranged two tin mirrors 3 m apart and placed a thermometer and a ‘matrass full of
relationship between heat transfer and temperature. In order to precisely measure
snow’ at their respective foci. He reported that as soon as the ‘matrass’ was in
the temperature of an object, it has to be isolated from its surroundings. But
place, the temperature recorded on the thermometer began to fall. Pictet found that
measurement of temperature involves some contact with a measuring device which
he could cause a greater fall in temperature by pouring nitric acid on the snow. He
will cause uncertainty in the temperature reading.
reported that, “The act was notorious, and amazed me at first; this phenomenon
offered nothing more than a final proof; if it had been necessary, of the reflection of Whilst a typical thermometer will display some uncertainty in its readings, one of the
heat...”. The phenomenon would be now be described as the result of the reflection authors of the Exeter research, Henry Miller, argues that when measuring on the very
(or lack of reflection) of infra-red radiation. small scale, a quantum thermometer has a different issue: “What we find is that
because the thermometer no longer has a well-defined energy and is actually in a
The colour of Concorde combination of different states at once, that this actually contributes to the
Concorde’s designers were aware of potential heating of the airframe due to uncertainty in the temperature that we can measure.” One interpretation of this
supersonic travel and set a maximum safe limit for the temperature of the aluminium claim is that an object might be considered to be at two temperatures at once.
body over the life of the aircraft at 127°C, limiting the top speed of the aircraft. The
aircraft was painted with a highly reflective white paint to prevent overheating.

In 1996, an Air France Concorde was given a blue livery as part of an advertising
promotion with Pepsi. The pilots were
warned to limit Mach 2 flight to no more
than 20 minutes due to the additional
aerodynamic heating of the new
paintwork.

Concorde would expand by as much as

300 mm when travelling at supersonic
speeds and a gap would open between
the flight engineer’s console and a
bulkhead. On the plane’s final flight, an
engineer placed a hat in the gap, where it
became permanently lodged as the plane
cooled down for the last time.

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Paying your electricity (duck) bill Salty storage

Energy generating companies need to predict the load on their network to ensure that As discussed above, the use of solar panel technology requires systems that can
demand can be met. A commonly plotted graph is that of the net load on the network store energy and release it when solar power output falls. A potential solution to this
against the time of day which displays the difference between the demand and the problem is to use a body of water, such as a lake, to store solar energy. However,
supply from renewable energy sources. A graph was developed by the California convection currents set up in the water result in efficient energy loss from the water
Independent System Operator to show the power demands that would remain after and, during a day, the temperature of a pond may vary by only a few degrees. If
the power supplied from solar power had been removed. When the graph was plotted convection currents could be inhibited, the transfer of energy from the pond would
it was noted that the curve resembles a duck. be reduced leading to a significant water temperature rise and more effective solar
energy storage. One way to do this is to dissolve salt into a pond. Due to the
difference in densities of high and low salinity water, saltwater will form a natural
concertation gradient, a halocline, with concentration increasing with depth. In a
solar pond, a halocline is created. When solar radiation warms the dense high-
salinity water near the pond’s floor, convection is limited as the high-salinity water
does not mix readily with the low salinity water in the layer above. Using this
technique, researchers have managed to create ponds that can reach up to 90°C
simply from solar heating. From the 1950s, researchers in Beit Ha’aravah in Israel
have used a 210,000 m² solar pond to generate a maximum of 5 MW of power at an
efficiency of around 1%.

Sucking the Sun dry

The Independent newspaper reported that residents of Woodland, North Carolina
rejected plans for the construction of solar power plant near their town. The paper
claims that, at a town council meeting, a local man expressed concerns that the
solar panels would “suck up all the energy from the sun”, harming local business. It
is reported that a local retired science teacher, Jane Mann, worried that the
construction of the farm would prevent plants in the area photosynthesising. Mann
In many contexts, after sunrise, demand for power falls just as the power output of
had noted that plants located close to solar panels turned brown and died.
photovoltaic systems rises creating the concave back of the duck. Peak demand for
power occurs just after sunset when no solar power is being generated, creating the
peak that forms the head of the duck. The duck curve highlights the importance of
power storage technologies such as batteries and pump storage, to ensure grids with
a high percentage of photovoltaic power generation can meet consumer demand.

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Measuring the Sun In 1838, Herschel was working at the Cape of Good Hope, carrying out astronomical
Perhaps the first quantitative measurement of solar radiation reaching the Earth observations, including the production of a catalogue of nebulae. He returned to his
was carried out by the French physicist Claude Pouillet. In the 1830s, Pouillet interest in solar radiation by conducting an experiment using a tin cylinder, filled with
constructed a double-walled cylinder 61 cm long and of 10 cm radius. He filled the inky water, within a larger iron container with a circular hole drilled in it that allowed
space between the walls with ice. At one end, he placed a piece of opaque light to fall on the tin vessel. From data collected using the instrument, Herschel
material, with a pinhole drilled into it, that allowed a beam of sunlight to enter the proposed a unit of solar radiation, the actine, which was defined as the intensity of
interior of the double cylinder and to fall on the blackened bulb of a thermometer vertically incident radiation that will melt a layer of ice one micrometre thick in one
inserted through the opposite end of the tube. Using a calculated value of the heat minute. He calculated the yearly solar radiation intensity would be sufficient to melt
capacity of the instrument, he could estimate the solar radiation falling on the a layer of ice 26.652 m deep across the surface of the planet.
device. Pouillet observed that, at noon on the summer solstice, solar radiation Energy and civilisation
caused the thermometer reading to increase by 7.5°C. From his data, he calculated
The Russian astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev, proposed that the technological
that the annual solar radiation would be sufficient to melt a layer of ice surrounding
advancement of alien civilisations could be inferred from their ability to harness
the globe 14 m thick.
energy. He developed the Kardashev scale to categorise the level of technological
Whilst on a tour of Europe, John Herschel, the son of the German British sophistication of civilisations.
astronomer Frederick William Herschel, travelled over an Alpine pass and recorded
• Type I civilisations can use and store all the energy available on their planet. In
in his journal the effects of solar radiation: “Vision quite scorched with the € [the
1973, Carl Sagan estimated that the Earth was currently at around 0.7 on the
Sun] & found sensation dreadful.” He noted that this experience sparked a
Kardashev scale and more recent estimates suggest that the current level may be
curiosity to investigate the power output of the star:
around 0.73.
…the scorching effect of the Sun’s rays upon every exposed part of the skin
• As civilisations advance, Kardashev predicted that they will become able to
proved so severe as to excite in my mind a lively desire to subject to some
harness all the energy produced by their local star, for example, by building a
precise means of measurement the cause of so disagreeable an effect.
Dyson sphere, a hypothetical structure that surrounds a star to capture its power
Herschel invented a new instrument, the actinometer, to study solar radiation. The output. Such civilisations are labelled type II.
device consisted of a thermometer-like device but the thermometer tube, rather
• Type III civilisations would be capable of capturing the energy of an entire galaxy.
than terminating in the usual bulb, was attached to a cylinder with a moveable
metal cap that could be adjusted by turning a screw. The cylinder was filled with
copper sulphate solution (a dark colour to absorb radiation) and placed in a box
shielded on three sides and with a glass wall on the fourth. A comparison of the
average heating in direct sunlight with the mean cooling in the shade gave a
measure of the effect of solar radiation. Whilst the device did not allow Herschel to
make quantitative estimates of solar radiation, he concluded that the Sun’s surface
must be hotter than a furnace.

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Climactic cycles The blunt body hypothesis

Whilst it has been erroneously used by climate deniers to argue against One of the many challenges of launching and safely returning astronauts to space is
anthropogenic climate change, the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit does cause the problem of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The competitors in the early
minor changes to the radiation incident on the Earth. However, orbital variation space race, the Soviet Union and the United States, took different approaches to
cannot account for the rapid and large-magnitude changes in global temperature solving the re-entry problem, leading to differently shaped spacecraft. The designers
linked to human activity. of the Vostok missions, a series of Soviet spaceflights in the early 1960s, chose a
spherical shape to give stability during flight through
In the 1920s, the Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković hypothesised that small
the atmosphere. By contrast, HJ Allen of
changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit, its axial tilt and precession would
NASA’s Ames Aeronautical Laboratory
cause cyclical changes to the intensity of solar radiation reaching the surface of
proposed the blunt body principle which
the Earth.
suggests that the shock wave formed
First, Milanković noted that the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit varies between by a blunt spacecraft travelling
0.005 and 0.058 (it is currently 0.017) with the major component of the variation through the atmosphere will
having a period of 404,000 years. This change in the shape of the Earth’s orbit dissipate up to 90% of the
arises because of the gravitational forces exerted by other bodies in the solar heating due to friction caused
system, primarily Jupiter and Saturn. The changing eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit by re-entry. Allen’s principle
changes the lengths of the seasons and consequently the radiation incident of the led to the truncated cone
surface of the planet. Currently, the Earth’s orbit is becoming less eccentric and so shape of the Mercury
season length is equalising. spacecraft, the first series of
American spacecraft designed
Second, the Earth precesses on its axis due to the torque exerted by the Sun and
to carry humans into space.
the Moon. The Earth’s axis of rotation currently aligns with the star Polaris. But
around 3000 BC, the Egyptians observed that the night sky seemed to revolve
around Alpha Draconis. The major component of the axial precession has a period
of 25,700 years and currently we are roughly in the middle of a cycle of change
between 21.8° and 24.4°. Changes to axial tilt alter the amount of solar radiation
incident on the poles.

Third, the Earth’s elliptical orbit itself precesses in space relative to fixed stars with
a period of 112,000 years. This precession changes the relative length of the
seasons on Earth.

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Stories from physics Stories from physics

A full set of references for this booklet is available at

talkphysics.org/groups/stories-from-physics
For more stories about physics:
- follow Richard on Twitter @RBrockPhysics
- visit spark.iop.org/stories-physics
Explore the IOP Energy & Thermal Physics teaching resources at
spark.iop.org/domains/energy-and-thermal-physics

Dr Richard Brock
Lecturer in Science Education at King’s College London.
After teaching physics in secondary schools for eight years, Richard studied
for a PhD in physics education and now teaches and conducts research at
King’s College London.

The Institute of Physics (IOP)

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the UK and Ireland, inspiring people to develop their knowledge, understanding
and enjoyment of physics.

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in schools; we encourage innovation, growth and productivity in business, including
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We are a world-leading science publisher and we are proud to be a trusted and
valued voice for the physics community.

© 2020

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