Let’s pause to catch our breath…what have we seen?  The new electrical atom, an atom shrouded by an electrical force, could be both perfectly hard and capable of bouncing off of other atoms with perfectly elastic collisions.  The kinetic theory has earned its metaphysical foundations and so would become the platform for the development of the laws of thermodynamics.  But before we go on to sketch these events and arguments, it makes sense for us to go back to the classroom.  A core aspect of this study is its labs and the delightful way we can tap into common phenomena.   Let’s look at these for a bit.

The first thing we do is try to make a fire.  It turns out to be really hard. Students try rubbing sticks to together and it never works.  Even when they push things by making fire bows to increase the speed of the ‘drill’, it fails.  They also try striking flint to get sparks that would catch tinder and cause it to light.  These, too, always fail, though you can get some things to char a bit; unless you are very careful about your materials.

Magnifying lenses are much more successful, but glass-making requires pretty sophisticated fires; so clearly, this was not how fires were made early on.  The moral of these efforts is that fires were so difficult to produce and yet so valuable, that ancient peoples would have worked very hard to make sure they did not go out.  To keep the flame going would have been of paramount importance.  As we discussed earlier in this essay, so great was its import that civil society itself may well have been the consequence, not to mention the central role of fires on the altar and the emergence of the priest as keeper of the flame.

Once we have done this, the next question we explore is the difference between heat and hotness.  That there is an issue here is made delightfully clear with a simple experience.  Get three bowls of water.  To the left is a bowl of cold water, on the right –hot water.  In the middle put a mix of hot and cold, lukewarm water.  Now place your left hand in the cold water and your right hand in the hot water.  Let them acclimate to the feel of the two bowls and then put both hands simultaneously in the middle bowl.  Your hands will give you conflicting signals…your left hand will say the water is hot, your right hand will say it’s cold.  Since we have every reason to believe that the water doesn’t care how hot or cold your hands had been before and that it is what it is, we conclude that hands are not a good measure of what’s going on with the water.  We also begin to see that there is some quality to the water that we are seeking that has to do with degrees of hotness.  Hence the need for a thermometer…our next lab.