Originally Posted By: jshaw
Originally Posted By: mechtech2
jshaw - I was not twisting your statement or taking it out of context.
"Water absorbs heat much slower than air.", is YOUR sentence.
And it is totally wrong.
Water has a high specific heat. Specific heat is the amount of energy required to change the temperature of a substance. Because water has a high specific heat, it can absorb large amounts of heat energy before it begins to get hot. It also means that water releases heat energy slowly when situations cause it to cool. Water's high specific heat allows for the moderation of the Earth's climate and helps organisms regulate their body temperature more effectively.
I borrowed this from the website that I referenced above but the information is widely available. Perhaps I am not TOTALLY wrong???????
Which web site? They seem to have a mis-understanding as well. How quickly an object gives off heat is related to emissivity/radiation properties and the surrounding environment.
In the case of water, it doesn't give off less heat, it just takes longer for it's temperature to drop because the specific heat constant works both ways.
Q=mc(delta[T]) is the equation for energy input with relation to a substance's mass (m), specific heat constant (c), and temperature (T).
With regards to the surrounding environment's temperature playing into the mix, you have probably seen this, but never thought anything of it. Things cool on a logarithmic scale. If you have a very warm object in a very cold environment, it will start rapidly cooling, but start to level off once it gets to within a certain range of equilibrium. If you want an example of this, look at how your car cools down once you shut it off in the dead of winter compared to summer. There is a big time time difference there.
One final thing that plays into the cooling off scenario is how much mixing is going on. If you introduce more mixing into the area, the rate of heat exchange can increase by a large amount.
