Background
Before the development of modern thermodynamics, it was thought that heat was a fluid, the so-called caloric. Bodies were capable of holding a certain amount of this fluid, hence the term heat capacity, named and first investigated by Joseph Black in the 1750s. Today one instead discusses the internal energy of a system. This is made up of its microscopic kinetic and potential energy. Heat is no longer considered a fluid. Rather, it is a transfer of disordered energy at the microscopic level. Nevertheless, at least in English, the term "heat capacity" survives. Some other languages prefer the term thermal capacity, which is also sometimes used in English.
Read more about this topic: Heat Capacity
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)