Two random questions about air

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I wasn't sure where to put this, but because it's a scientific based question, I thought it'd go best in this topic because there's more likely to be Aspies about here who are willing to answer the questions.

1. I read somewhere that there is no temperature in outer space, so how would it feel on your skin if you actually ''felt'' it? Also what would a thermometer say? These questions may be illogical because you can't go into outer space without space suit things on, but just try to use your scientific imagination.

2. I also read somewhere that your body is like a vacuum, there's no air inside your body. But when your food digests, air bubbles can form from all the food going round and round, or from certain foods that produce gas in your stomach like salted peanuts or dried fruit (I think), even if you really don't swallow much air, gas can still form. Why do people with IBS or other stomach problems get more gas than people without it? Surely they don't swallow more air than people without no stomach issues just because they've got a stomach issue? Air bubbles don't form in liquids unless there's air around it. That's confusing.
Also I've often felt gassy but suddenly the gas went away without any coming out? Where did it all go? (And don't tell me I will eventually combust, because I choose not to believe it!)

Thank you for taking your time to answer these random questions.

In order to have 'heat', you have to have either molecular activity or some form of radiation. A vacuum, by definition, has no molecules. In deep space, stellar radiation is too weak to heat things up. Thus, space should have no temperature. However, the "Cosmic Background Radiation" left over from the Big Bang (~13.7 x 10^9 years ago) tends to keep objects in deep space at about 2.725°K.


This is wrong. There is air in your body -- in your lungs, dissolved in your blood, and diffused throughout your tissues.

A vacuum is merely a scientific model. It does not exist in nature, therefore there is no reason to expect there to be "no temperature" in space.

Temperature is not a thing, it is measure of something, so I don't understand what "no temperature" even means. The temperature in outer space is extremely low. Assuming the human body's neurological system was functioning more or less as it does on Earth (which is a hugely uncertain assumption that is likely false), it would feel extremely cold. There is no thermometer in existence that can measure a temperature so low, so, whatever the thermometer read would be extremely inaccurate. Assuming the thermometer was functioning normally, it would probably just show the lowest temperature it is capable of measuring.

Vacuums don't exist? The ideal, perfect vacuum, perhaps; but the vacuum of deep space ain't exactly filled with chopped liver, either.

In classical electromagnetism, the "Vacuum of Free Space", or sometimes just "Free Space" or "Perfect Vacuum", is a standard reference medium for electromagnetic effects. Some authors refer to this reference medium as classical vacuum, a terminology intended to separate this concept from QED vacuum or QCD vacuum, where vacuum fluctuations can produce transient virtual particle densities and a relative permittivity and relative permeability that are not identically unity.

In the theory of classical electromagnetism, free space has the following properties:

• Electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, which is c = 299,792,458 meters per second.
  
• The superposition principle is always exactly true. For example, the electric potential generated by two charges is the simple addition of the potentials generated by each charge in isolation. The value of the electric field at any point around these two charges is found by calculating the vector sum of the two electric fields from each of the charges acting alone.
  
• The permittivity and permeability are exactly the electric constant ε0 and magnetic constant μ0, respectively (in SI units), or exactly 1 (in Gaussian units).
  
• The characteristic impedance (η) equals the impedance of free space Z0 ≈ 376.73 Ω.

I know the difference between a "perfect" vacuum and the Vacuum of Space. Either way, the original premise still stands.

I don't know which premise you are referring to. Whatever you are talking about, the way you are describing it is confusing. First, you say

then you refer to what you claim to be a different concept as
. You're saying they are two different things, but calling them essentially the same thing. Also,
,
yet

and give a definition that is far different from "has no molecules." So it's not clear what you are talking about. It's not clear what difference there is between the two vacuums you are comparing, specifically, that the vacuum you originally referenced is not purely theoretical.

The average temperature of space is about 2.3 degrees Kelvin.

ruveyn

It can be argued that the lungs are not inside the body. I have heard the notion that as far as a body is concerned, the guts, the stomach, and the air ways of our throat and lungs, are all outside of the body.

still doesnt change the fact that we have a lot of disolved gasses in our sytem.

1. Temperature is a measurement of how hot or cold something is. Everything has a temperature. I don't know where you read that there is "no temperature" in outer space, but that would actually be impossible. If something exists, it has to have a temperature.

2. When you say there is "no air" inside your body, you need to be a bit more specific. What do you mean by "air?" There are several gases that make up what we call "air" on planet earth. The main one we need to be concerned about is oxygen. As I'm sure you know, we humans breathe in oxygen and then breathe out carbon dioxide. So there is definitely oxygen inside our bodies. It gets carried by our blood cells to all of the cells that need it, and then osmosis takes place. Osmosis is the process by which the oxygen enters the cells. I'm no expert on science but I do remember about osmosis from when I did biology at school.

With regards to the gas in our intestines, I did not know much about how that got there, so I looked it up on Google. Apparently that smelly gas that comes out when we fart is actually produced inside our intestines. It is not there because we breathed it in (yuck! Imagine breathing in smelly farts! No thank you!) Rather, it is there because the bacteria in our intestine actually produce it when they're breaking down the food:

The gas in our intestines is a different kind to the kind in our stomachs. Again, I think the actual process of the food breaking down in our stomachs produces certain gases. Some people's stomachs seem to produce more gas than others, which is why some people get painful problems while others don't. Also, some of the build up of gas in your stomach can be a result of accidentally swallowing air, or drinking carbonated drinks. If you get air inside your tummy, you either have to burp it back up, or else you have painful gas trapped in your tummy which will then pass down to your intestine and later be pooed out.

Temperature is the average kinetic energy of an ensemble of particles. Temperature is a measure of motion.

From the wiki article on temperatue:

"On the molecular level, temperature is the result of the motion of the particles that constitute the material. Moving particles carry kinetic energy. Temperature increases as this motion and the kinetic energy increase. The motion may be the translational motion of particles, or the energy of the particle due to molecular vibration or the excitation of an electron energy level. Although very specialized laboratory equipment is required to directly detect the translational thermal motions, thermal collisions by atoms or molecules with small particles suspended in a fluid produces Brownian motion that can be seen with an ordinary microscope. The thermal motions of atoms are very fast and temperatures close to absolute zero are required to directly observe them. For instance, when scientists at the NIST achieved a record-setting low temperature of 700 nK (1 nK = 10−9 K) in 1994, they used laser equipment to create an optical lattice to adiabatically cool caesium atoms. They then turned off the entrapment lasers and directly measured atom velocities of 7mm per second in order to calculate their temperature."

"If the velocities of a group of electrons, e.g., in a plasma, follow a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, then the electron temperature is well-defined as the temperature of that distribution. For other distributions, two-thirds of the average energy is often referred to as the temperature, since for a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution with three degrees of freedom, .":

Statistical mechanics approach to temperature

Statistical mechanics provides a microscopic explanation of temperature, based on macroscopic systems' being composed of many particles, such as molecules and ions of various species, the particles of a species being all alike. It explains macroscopic phenomena in terms of the mechanics of the molecules and ions, and statistical assessments of their joint adventures. In the statistical thermodynamic approach, degrees of freedom are used instead of particles.

On the molecular level, temperature is the result of the motion of the particles that constitute the material. Moving particles carry kinetic energy. Temperature increases as this motion and the kinetic energy increase. The motion may be the translational motion of particles, or the energy of the particle due to molecular vibration or the excitation of an electron energy level. Although very specialized laboratory equipment is required to directly detect the translational thermal motions, thermal collisions by atoms or molecules with small particles suspended in a fluid produces Brownian motion that can be seen with an ordinary microscope. The thermal motions of atoms are very fast and temperatures close to absolute zero are required to directly observe them. For instance, when scientists at the NIST achieved a record-setting low temperature of 700 nK (1 nK = 10−9 K) in 1994, they used laser equipment to create an optical lattice to adiabatically cool caesium atoms. They then turned off the entrapment lasers and directly measured atom velocities of 7mm per second in order to calculate their temperature.

Molecules, such as oxygen (O2), have more degrees of freedom than single spherical atoms: they undergo rotational and vibrational motions as well as translations. Heating results in an increase in temperature due to an increase in the average translational energy of the molecules. Heating will also cause, through equipartitioning, the energy associated with vibrational and rotational modes to increase. Thus a diatomic gas will require a higher energy input to increase its temperature by a certain amount, i.e. it will have a higher heat capacity than a monatomic gas.

The process of cooling involves removing thermal energy from a system. When no more energy can be removed, the system is at absolute zero, which cannot be achieved experimentally. Absolute zero is the null point of the thermodynamic temperature scale, also called absolute temperature. If it were possible to cool a system to absolute zero, all motion of the particles comprising matter would cease and they would be at complete rest in this classical sense. Microscopically in the description of quantum mechanics, however, matter still has zero-point energy even at absolute zero, because of the uncertainty principle.

ruveyn

^ That's all a little bit advanced for the OP, though, don't you think?

For the OP's purposes, and for the average layman, it's true what I said: temperature is a measurement of how hot or cold something is! Everything is either hot or cold, so therefore it is impossible for something to "not have a temperature."

As already explained, there is no such thing as 'no temperature'. Temperature is caused by atoms moving about (Brownian movement). In regions of space where there are very few atoms, the temperature is exceedingly low. If it were at all possible to expose yourself to such temperatures, you'd feel nothing. The nerve endings in your skin would freeze immediately.

As for the gas in the bowels, there are several causes.

1. Swallowing air.
People swallow more air when they are stressed, smoke, drink through a straw, chew gum, talk fast or eat fast.
2. Some foods contain more air
Examples: Carbonated drinks, beer, whipped cream, souflé, bread and omelette.
3. Some foods contain carbohydrates that don't disgest completely in the small intestine. They end up in the large intestine where they are fermented by bacteria. This fermentation produces gas. Examples of such foods are wholewheat bread, beans, peas, onions, peanuts and some cabbages.
4. Lactose intolerance. Again the small intestine can't digest the food properly and it ends up fermenting in the large intestine
5. (Hidden) infections and irritated bowels. See 3 and 4 for the explanation.

That is a very superficial way of putting it. Temperature is -really- the average kinetic energy of an aggregate of small objects. It is a measure of energy, not the quantity of a substance. In the very Old Day, heat was believed to be a fluid called caloric. Now we know heat is the energy of motion.

ruveyn

You are correct.

I've heard that black is white, night is day, right is wrong, poverty is wealth, pain is pleasure, slavery is freedom, education is ignorance, wisdom is foolishness, love is hatred, death is life, belief is evidence, war is peace, and a host of other equally obnoxious and stupid ideas.

Now I get to add "Inside is outside" to the list.