Whats the difference in heat and temperature

Question: Whats the difference in heat and temperature
- Keywords:
  heat,
  temperature
Asked by benmck to Angela, Gabriele, Karen, Maria, Shane on 11 Nov 2013.
- Karen McCarthy answered on 11 Nov 2013:
  
  Basically, heat is a form of energy, and temperature is a measure of the degree of this energy aka a measure of how hot or cold something is. Heat energy is caused by atoms moving very fast, in a very disorganised way. This energy can be transferred to different objects whose atoms aren’t acting as disorganised, and so the heat is said to “flow”.
  
  So you can also say temperature is the ability of an object to gain or give this heat energy – an object can increase/decrease temperature aka can receive or give heat energy.
- Shane Mc Guinness answered on 11 Nov 2013:
  
  The difference between heat and temperature? That’s a very clever question, I think they cover this in the Leaving Cert, good work!
  So, when something has lots of energy it gives this away in other forms, by giving off light or by moving/vibrating, or by getting bigger or expanding. when other things get this energy, like our bodies, we feel this as heat. Heat is energy basically that helps our cells doing work. The way we measure this is using a temperature scale. Though it does not mean something exactly it is a good way of comparing one thing to another. So we can measure the amount of heat in something by the amount it has expanded with the energy it has. That’s how thermometers work! Alcohol or mercury in thermometers gets bigger when it has more energy and gets warmer!
  The cool thing is that some things store energy better than others, without appearing to get warmer! We call this the “heat capacity” of something. How much energy you need to put into something before it heats up. So the heat of something does not always equal the energy we have put into it!
  So basically, heat is a form of energy, which we measure and compare using a temperature scale!
- Gabriele De Chiara answered on 11 Nov 2013:
  
  Hello, heat is not the energy of a body. It is the energy that is transferred from a warm body to a colder body. The energy of a body is called the internal energy. The property defining what is warm and what is cold is called temperature. If we take a reference temperature, then we can measure all other temperatures compared to that one. For example say that a body is at equilibrium with a big tank of water and ice at sea level. We can call this t=0 Centigrades. Similarly, we can define boiling water at sea level to be t=100 Centigrades. Then the other intermediate temperatures can be measured in reference to 0 and 100. However there is a special temperature: -273 centigrades called the absolute zero which is the lowest possible temperature. Nothing can be cooled below that temperature. So physicists in general measure their temperatures using this temperature as a reference and call it T=0 Kelvin. This temperature is not ambiguous as the centigrades that need boiling or freezing water at sea level so that air pressure is controlled. Absolute temperature of a body is directly proportional to the kinetic energy of the atoms composing it.
- Angela Stevenson answered on 12 Nov 2013:
  
  Everyone has already done a fantastic job at explaining this! to sum it up, heat is energy, temperature is not 🙂 Now here’s a good example of the difference between temperature and heat: hot coals! Hot coals are at a high temperature, but if you touch them very briefly, only a small amount of heat energy is transferred to your feet. Your feet are not burned (well… this is somewhat true!). The same is true when you sip hot coffee instead of gulping it down. Hope we answered your question!

Question: Whats the difference in heat and temperature

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