Introduction to Temperature and Pressure

Human civilization has been flourishing since time immemorial. With each advancement, we are achieving milestones towards the progress of society. The way we live and the way we conduct our day to day lifestyle describes a lot about our environmental and climatic conditions. 

Talking about the environment, there is no way you haven’t thought about temperature, while the other important factor constitutes pressure. Whenever we decide to move to a new place the very first thing which comes to our mind is temperature while the altitude from the sea level decides the pressure of the particular place. 

What is temperature? 

Let’s think of a situation where we didn’t have any sensation of heat or cold. We could not differentiate a hot or a cool thing from each other. Besides how weird it sounds, just think about the possibility of how dangerous it would be. We would hurt ourselves without even realizing it. Hence, to fix up this, the term “temperature” is introduced. The temperature gives us information about the amount of heat energy or coldness an object is holding at a particular instance. 

In other words, we can define temperature as the measurement of the hotness or coldness an object has. Take, for example, we are in a science laboratory to carry out an important experiment with water which should have the heat of a specific measurement. In this situation, if we don’t have a method to measure the heat, it is possible that the experiment will go wrong. Here, to solve this issue, we introduce, temperature. 

Once we can know the required specific temperature any of the experiments can be performed successfully. Now as we’ve already found out what the temperature means, the next question that arises here is how do we measure it? The S.I. unit to measure temperature was taken as Celsius and the other units include Fahrenheit and Kelvin. Out of which kelvin is used to measure temperatures related to laboratory activities while Celsius and Fahrenheit are used commonly. 

How can we measure temperature? 

Even when we already know the units to measure the temperatures, how are we going to perform it? No one would ever want to dip their finger in a vessel of boiling water to end up with blisters all over the skin. So the next question here is, what to use to measure a temperature? We need a device that can save us from burning or freezing ourselves. For this purpose, the thermometer was invented. 

A thermometer is a device that is used to measure the temperature of any object or a place. We can either use it manually for measuring our body temperature or fix it in the walls like that of a laboratory to measure the temperature of a particular place or room. Initially, mercury was filled inside a thermometer since it is the only element to remain liquid at room temperature hence was used extensively because of its flowing property but these days digital thermometer is the preferred, reason being easy to handle and safe. 

What is pressure? 

Have you experienced difficulty in breathing while you were hiking in a mountainous region? Or suddenly your nose started to bleed while you were walking through a hilly place? That happens because of a term known as “pressure”. In simple words, pressure is another environmental factor which is the force applied perpendicular to the surface of an object per unit mass. This means while you were hiking there was a force being exerted on you by the environment. 

The S.I. unit of pressure is Newton per metre square (n/m²) or Pascal. The pressure applied on your body is larger on high altitude areas in comparison to a plane surface hence it sometimes gets difficult to catch a breath. While nose bleeding occurs due to the rupture of capillaries because of the force exerted on the body. As the body is not able to balance a large amount of pressure applied it sometimes ends up like this. 

Conclusion 

While we talked about the temperature, the pressure, its S.I. units, their influence on our day to day lives we also discovered some of the effects of these factors we were unaware of. Here one important point to be understood is that when we move towards the higher altitudes from the sea level the temperature gradually starts decreasing while the pressure increases. 

Hence, we can conclude from this statement that the temperature of any place is inversely proportional to the pressure applied to the object and vice versa. Also, the temperature of an object influences the state of the object i.e., you must have noticed that when we provide heat of a specific amount to temperature its particles start moving and hence generate kinetic energy.