posted
What was that movie...? I saw a clip on YouTube of a Chinese movie about Japanese experiments on people during WWII. In this scene a guy is put in a vacuum chamber and starts to blow up like a balloon...
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"That NASA guy was probably still in room-temperature conditions[.]"
I don't think you can have a room-temperature vacuum. Or, to put it another way, in a vacuum, the room's temperature is very very cold.
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posted
Temperature is a physical property, so you have to have something there in order to measure its temperature. In a vacuum, there's nothing there, so there's nothing to measure, therefore there is no temperature. That does not equate to absolute zero.
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posted
But space is not an absolute vacuum. It's just a near-vacuum. Therefore, it has temperature. Right?
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Contrary to popular understanding, outer space is not completely empty (i.e. a perfect vacuum) but contains a low density of particles, predominantly hydrogen plasma, as well as electromagnetic radiation. Hypothetically, it also contains dark matter and dark energy.
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
It has a temperature, MinutiaeMan, because there is some gas out there (see the wiki on the heliopause, btw, its very interesting) but it's very very low. If memory serves, somewhere around -450*C. But the vacuum the scientist was exposed to would have a similar temperature. What you must remember is that 'cold' is the absence of heat; in other words, if you're in a cold room, what you mean is that the temperature in the room is lower than your body temperature so that you're losing heat to the air around you. In space you can't lose heat via convection (very efficiently) but you do lose heat by radiation. However it'd take hours and hours to freeze in that fashion - maybe days, I haven't done the math.
The boiling effect is because when you lower the pressure of a liquid enough, it will phase to a gas to fill the vacuum (and actually, that takes heat energy to accomplish, so as your spit boiled your tongue would feel cold, not hot). That's what happens when you crack your knuckles, according to a study John Hopkins did a while back - you lower the pressure of the fluid in the joints enough that some of it turns to a gas, creating bubbles. It happens very suddenly, hence the crack.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Close, Daniel. Absolute Zero -- or 0 Kelvins -- is about -460° Farenheit, but -273.15°C. You can still have matter present with no temperature. Absolute Zero is an indicator of no atomic motion at all (above zero-point energy), since motion is heat. I think the coldest we've been able to achieve in careful experiments here on Earth is about 700 nK, and the coldest temperature we've found in deep space so far is about 1 K, and I think the lowest it gets in the vicinity of our solar system is about 3 K. And the vacuums to which test subjects are exposed are far warmer due to being far less perfect.
I remember cringing when watching episodes of TNG and later Trek when someone gives a temperature as "minus three hundred (something) degrees Celsius" or otherwise gives a temperature below Absolute Zero. *heh*
--Jonah
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Registered: Feb 2001
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WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus:
I remember cringing when watching episodes of TNG and later Trek when someone gives a temperature as "minus three hundred (something) degrees Celsius" or otherwise gives a temperature below Absolute Zero. *heh*
--Jonah
Maybe they just reworked the scale like they did with warp factors.
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posted
Well, Kelvin and Celsius make sense to me. Farenheit has been losing its grip on my brain slowly but steadily. Especially since I found out how Farenheit got his zero point. I'd wondered for a long time what it was based on, since it obviously wasn't water... A brine of water, ice, and ammonium chloride -- the temperature at which that froze. Um... what?
--Jonah
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Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Celsius makes more sense to me, but since I was raised using Farenheit, I can't understand it. I can walk outside and know what a 50F day feels like, but Celsius man, what is 50F like 14C?
Kelvin is just whatever celsius is, +/- 273 degrees, and even that seems to make more sense than Farenheit.
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Registered: Jul 2007
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posted
It's simple. Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. So 50 degrees centigrade is fooking hot, or if you wish, half way towards scalding, by definition.
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Should've checked the wiki before I hit the post button.
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