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| Author | Topic: A science question | |||||||||||||
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MangyTiger Member (Idle past 6384 days)  Posts: 989 From: Leicester, UK Joined: |
Welcome to the forum DS650Heavy - I'm sure a friendly admin will be along presently to point you at helpful links showing how to use quote boxes and other nifty features to make posts easier to follow.
Since a vacuum is the absence of matter, heat conduction cannot take place through a vacuum, and therefore a vacuum is a perfect insulator. (Bolding mine) This statement by Percy seems right - heat conduction is by definition the transmission of heat across matter. Since a vacuum contains no matter there can be zero conduction across it and so it is perfect insulator with regard to heat conduction. On the other hand a vacuum is clearly not a perfect insulator with regard to electromagnetic radiation (the clue is that big yellow thing you see in the sky when you look up on a sunny day  ).
A perfect insulator resists the transfer of any form of energy. And even if we were to limit the statement to "Since a vacuum is the absence of matter, heat conduction cannot take place through a vacuum, and therefore a vacuum is a perfect thermal insulator" infrared radiation is a transfer of energy and, therefore, heat. As I said above, you need to change this to "a vacuum is a perfect thermal insulator with regard to conduction". Disclaimer - I haven't done any physics for 26 years so I may well be wrong ! Oops! Wrong Planet
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