William Henry Bragg Quotes

When air is hot, the molecules move fast and they have high kinetic energy. The colder the molecules are, the smaller their velocities are and, subsequently, their energy. Temperature is simply a way to characterize the energy of a system.

Last year, I made a refrigerator in my basement. And I needed to because I needed to figure how - you know there is no such thing as 'cold.' There is only less heat.

What appeared to the earlier physicists to be the constant quantity of heat is nothing more than the whole motive power of the motion of heat, which remains constant so long as it is not transformed into other forms of work, or results afresh from them.

The older view of the nature of heat was that it is a substance, very fine and imponderable indeed, but indestructible, and unchangeable in quantity, which is an essential fundamental property of all matter.

It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt.

According to the kinetic theory of gases, the mean kinetic energy of a molecule is a measure of absolute temperature.

Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.

The fall of a given weight from a height of around 365 meters corresponds to the heating of an equal weight of water from 0° to 1°.

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.

But heat can also be produced by the friction of liquids, in which there could be no question of changes in structure, or of the liberation of latent heat.

Take ice. Ice is fascinating to me. Ice is the one thing in our world that went from an agricultural product to being manufactured.

It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them; the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations, and this speed is about a kilometre per second.

If you assume that it was a valid experiment, then its disintegration reveals a very substantial part of what has been found since then, including the fact that you can get heat generation at high temperature.

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.

If your theory is found to be against the second law of theromodynamics, I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Electrons are the carriers for electricity, but they are also carriers for thermal energy. This means thermal conductivity is increased when the carrier density is increased.

Weather systems are natural heat engines, and like all other heat engines, both natural and artificial, they are driven not by temperature per se, but by differences in temperature between one location and another.

There are two ways you can receive energy from your environment: One is molecules bumping against you. That's the air. The other is radiative energy. That's what you're feeling from the sun. When they say "Get out of the sun, out of the heat," the air is the same temperature; it's just you're exposed to sunlight.

As soon as we step beyond the established boundaries of pure thermodynamic theory, we enter a trackless region confronting us with obstacles which even the most astute of us are almost at a loss to tackle.

If, as is the custom, I speak mainly about my own researches, I must say that I was fortunate in finding that not everything had yet been gleaned in the field of general thermodynamic radiation theory.

Energy Is Conserved.

Mechanical refrigeration has been found in advance of the wants of the country.

I leaned in science class that everything that generates light generates a little bit of heat, but not everything that generates head generates light. So it is with journalism.

Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us.