Cold and black

For some odd reason instead of being asleep in the wee hours of the morning I was thinking about how we often label as opposites what are really lesser and greater quantities of the same thing. The best examples I could think of were temperature and light.

In temperature we refer to hotter and colder but the quality 'cold' really doesn't exist outside of ourselves. It's purely a subjective relationship. Heat is a measure of how much kinetic activity there is in something. It can vary quite a bit. From zero (absolute zero) activity to the top end in plasma where all normal characteristics of a substance are lost. What we refer to as 'cold' is just a range on that continium. Similarly black isn't a color. It's just the absense of light. Light can appear in colors depending on how it's being filtered. White is merely all the colors combined. But pure black only exists in the absense of any light.

I guess it's mostly semantics...

Comments

Anonymous said…
Fights over semantics have caused wars. I know people that will argue all day long over semantics. You are most correct in your position, however. There is no cold, only absence of heat. There is no black, only absence of light.
12:02 PM
Anonymous said…
Sure thing,we're just talking about comfortable heat,as we talk of the amount of light necessary to our eyes to see arount us. No heat at all or no light at all: we never had.
in a crowded universe hard to reach point zero.
9:06 PM
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