The Power of Pondering Or (?) Imagination
In my previous essay John O’Sullivan, the PSI editor, had changed the title (How Stupid Am I) of this essay when he published it. It is a fact that I earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry nearly fifty years ago (1969).
But I have never taken a philosophy course. So, for a long time I had never considered that I was a philosopher. Now, I am not so certain about this.
I like to quote what I consider to be the wisdom of certain people (scientists) of notable achievements. Whose wisdom might be considered a bit of ‘truth’. R. C. Sutcliffe, a meteorologist, wrote (Weather and Climate): “The classical scientists were philosophers not engineers.”
An engineer recently wrote me:
“If you continuously quote others, there is not much room for comment, unless one is concerned that the quote is not accurate or is taken out of context. Philosophy certainly occupies a dominant place in our overall education, but I question whether it should occupy a central role in a mundane discussion – such as whether AGW is real or imagined. My use of quoted material is generally limited to text which is germaine to technical arguments.”
In the previous essay I had speculated that Horace de Saussure’s hot box (http://principia-scientific.
So when Kuhnkat provided two links (http://www.solarcooking.org/
And it was only when, after thanking Kuhnkat for this information and beginning to add comments about this information, that I discovered that I had stupidly leaped before I had pondered.
Most damming was the fact that the author of the second link had written: “the glass lid had to be removed as glass is opaque to infrared and would inhibit the cooling”. Most damming because I try to ponder (weigh in my mind) the validity such logical statements which are not presented with supporting evidence. But in my mind and in my comments to this previous essay, the fact was I had not pondered once about the information of both links which I had read.
The following is a brief example of what I consider the power (value) of pondering to be. What I briefly report I consider to be only the tip of the figurative iceberg. But, I have decided it is best to keep this essay brief and explore later what might be found under the water.
In the previous essay I had reviewed the observations of dew or frost on car windshields when the ambient air temperature was 4oF or so above the air’s frost point temperatures. So, I knew that frost would form on the glass lid when the ambient air’s frost point temperature was a little below water’s freezing temperature and that frost was unlikely to form when the air’s frost point was far was maybe 10oF, or more, lower than water’s freezing point.
The objective of the second link’s author’s efforts was not to find if the interior of the cold box would cool beneath the ambient air temperature; it was to find if ice could be formed in his box-cooker with a black base. So, he poured a one centimeter layer of water on its bottom and removed its glass lid.
As I pondered this system a bit, one, no two, maybe three critical factors became obvious. The first was: if the cover had been left on, the dewpoint of air in the box-cooker would quickly become the temperature of the layer of water regardless of its thickness.
Hence, when the bottom side of the glass lid cooled to this temperature, dew would begin to condense on the lid bottom. And the latent heat of condensation would prevent the lid bottom from cooling below the freezing point of water until all the water of the layer was covered with a thin sheet of ice, if any ice did form.
A question I asked myself was: Why should any ice ever begin to form?
My answer: If the top of the glass lid cooled below the freezing point of water, there will be created a temperature difference between the warmer bottom of the lid and its cooler top.
Hence some energy would be conducted from the box interior through the glass lid to its top surface where this conducted energy could be radiated to space. What the magnitude of this temperature gradient might be I have no idea.
But a fact is that some energy would be removed from the interior of the box during the nighttime and this removal might result in the freezing of water. And only experimentation can tell us what actually can happen.
Next, I pondered what would happen when the lid was removed. Here I know, according to the author’s report, some ice was found to have been formed. And almost immediately I began to see some critical factors. Which is not the water can now directly emit radiation toward space from its surface, which it does.
It is that the water vapor, which evaporated from the water surface and quickly saturated the interior of the box with its lid on, can freely diffuse into the dry ambient air whose dew point is much lower than the freezing point of water.
And it is not hard to see that in this case the water layer is being cooled by two common and well-understood mechanisms.
Cooling by evaporation and cooling by radiation (emission). And a very important mechanism (natural phenomenon) involved, which does not require any convection and about which I have seldom read in the context of atmospheric science, is diffusion.
But even more important (my opinion) about the report of this experiment by a person who was only trying to freeze water in his box-cooker is what he described is a simple laboratory-like version of the mechanisms by which lake and sea surfaces naturally freeze when their surfaces first freeze, most likely during the nighttime.
Einstein stated: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
While I still do not yet know if ice will form in the box-cooker with its glass lid on, I consider I understand the actual mechanisms by which natural water surfaces freeze. About which mechanisms R. C. Sutcliffe (Weather and Climate) wrote:
“All this [It does not matter what this is. JLK] may seem a far cry from the general circulation of the world’s atmosphere but the detail serves to point the moral, that one cannot explain the broad features of world climate if one does not know the actual mechanisms involved.”
Even though I have completed my brief pondering of using a box-cooker to freeze water, I do need to comment on the “or (?) imagination” portion of the essay’s title.
Einstein stated: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” and “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
I speculate that few have pondered what Einstein’s imagination could be. In the next essay I will ponder (which process I have now simply demonstrated as I understand it) if this process of imagination could be the process of pondering.
So a not incidental purpose of this essay is to encourage a reader to ponder about imagination which is what I will be doing as I write the next planned, but not yet written, essay. I will do this by considering what more I can learn from the information presented to you and me in the two links provided by Kuhnkat.
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