How Hot Is That?

FREE Institute of Physics GENERAL PUBLIC talks across the UK London and Southeast (LSE) region in autumn / winter 2025

Talk held at 37 Caledonian Rd, London on Wed, 15 Oct 2025, 18:00.

Tea/coffee served from 6 - 6.30pm. Lecture starts: 6.30pm for 1hr (with 15mins for questions)

Registration: https://www.iop.org/events/how-hot-0

Capacity: 100

Level: General public / interest. Suitable for students

Cost: FREE

For details of talks in the spring / summer 2025 lecture series please click HERE

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Speaker: Alan Davies, University of Hertfordshire

Abstract

We are all familiar with feeling ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ and heat is a constant in human life. However, attempts to quantify it have been fraught with difficulty. The temperature of a body is a measure of its heat content and in this talk, we shall discuss the variety of instruments and scales designed to record it. We shall answer questions such as “what is the lowest temperature ever measured?” and “which scale has water boiling at 80o?”