You can’t heat Nothing!
Only this morning very early the enormity of what I had written yesterday struck me. Whereas the Rev Philip Foster had supplied some elegant constructs, I will now tempt you with some extremely simple arithmetic. Twice one is two, twice two is four. Are we agreed? But what is twice nought? Of course, it is nought. Let us go further. What is one thousand times nought? Of course, that is also nought, nothing, zero. Let us try one more time – What is 6,000C, which is reckoned to be the temperature of the corona of the Sun, what is 6,000 Centigrade times nothing? – you have it in one. It is zero, it is nix, it is nil, it is absolutely NOTHING!
This accounts for the temperature of Outer Space. Since space contains nothing, then the temperature of Outer Space is zero. Okay, it is given a Kelvin number, since dust particles may stray there. But the space itself is zero.
So now I am going to attempt to answer some of the questions that I posed yesterday in my essay ‘What’s in the space?’ Was Galileo right? I mean, does the atmosphere have mass? The answer is complex, but in the simplest terms the atmosphere has increasing mass from the top down. At the edge of space there are very few molecules and according to an email I had from the astrophysicist James Peden there are very few molecules at the Karman line, but they are very hot – how hot cannot be possibly measured by conventional thermometers. But the vastness of the Thermosphere is cold. Why? Because it is near vacuum, it is nearly empty. And you cannot heat empty, as per the foregoing conclusions.
So is the atmosphere being heated from the top down or from the bottom up? The answer must be both. The Sun is heating mass, but only where there is mass. So the Greenhouse Gases must absorb the incoming infrared, and this is most easily illustrated by Water Vapour and clouds. For the full scientific argument on how this is done I would refer the reader to the paper by Hans Schreuder, ‘Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cool the Earth.’ (Affix link here). Clearly as Hans Schreuder argues the Greenhouse Gases absorb incoming radiation near-IR, which is far greater than far-IR, and therefore the Greenhouse Gases, far from causing warming, do exactly the opposite, – they have a net cooling effect, and this has been confirmed by NASA.
Everything now is perfectly logical. Once we realise that it is utterly impossible to warm nothing, then we also realise that – words are failing me here! – Where there is little mass there can only be little heat, there has to be something to get hot. So the molecules may warm, but the space in between is actually neither hot nor cold – it is absence. We call it cold, because it is the absence of heat. Am I making sense? Shall I tell you something? I do not know myself. I have to ask my scientist friends if this makes sense, as I receive what I understand as a sort of intuition.
The fundamentals remain the same. Radiation has to encounter mass to produce heat. The greatest concentration of atmospheric molecules is at sea level, where earth and oceans meet the air. Therefore what we measure as temperature is but a tiny part of the whole. I leave it to my readers to apprehend the consequences of the foregoing, if proved scientifically correct.
Strictly speaking there is no such thing as cold, but there is absence of warmth, of heat. Which is why I suppose we have the Kelvin scale, which goes down to absolute zero. What we call cold is the absence of warmth because of the absence of matter, the absence of mass, in a word the absence of molecules, since only matter can be warmed.
Surely, as the radiation from the Sun descends through our atmospheres it must collide on its way with molecules and divest itself of some of its heating properties, which is why we do not experience the same wild swings of temperature as on the Moon.
Let us be clear then: Neither Man nor the Sun can heat nothing. I ask you then: ‘What must this mean for the Globe?
Anthony Bright-Paul
Trackback from your site.