Scientific questions for clothes
0 Comments Published by Vivek Kumar on Wednesday, March 16, 2005 at 7:30 AM.
There is general trend to say that this cloth is warm and this is not! I also used to say the same things before I entered into my higher secondary class, and we started reading Physics thoughtfully. There were many conceptual questions that the book of Physics had, and they were rather interesting for the fact that these questions dealt more with common life problems. Some of them explained how we walk on earth, why the boat is pushed back when someone jumps ashore from it, and why we color the solar-cooker black? All these questions were amazing and almost all of them were eye-openers.
One day we were reading about Thermodynamics and there came a fact that air was bad conductor of heat, and therefore, if we have a quilt and two blankets of same thickness, the blankets would be more warmer than the quilt. This was due to the fact that the air trapped between these blankets would be more than the air trapped in the wool of a quilt! This was an interesting fact for us, and we wondered that why people say that a particular cloth is warm, when actually that quality depends upon the volume of air trapped!
Yes, if you feel a cloth warmer than the other one, it is just due to the fact that the cloth traps more air. There is no warm and cold cloth by nature, it is due to the quality of reluctance to heat of the air trapped in the fibers of those clothes.
The story did not end here, as there was another question that challenged the use of clothes at all; for, as the question suggested that if air is a bad conductor, why we wear clothes at all? --When we air all around us, there will be no feeling of coldness! It was really a challenging question, but the laws of Thermodynamics suggests that the air can take heat from our body through convection, if not through conduction! This is also the reason of drying of the clothes in sun! Really, science is amazing in its questions and also in its answers!
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