Friendly units for coldness

Abstract

Measures of temperature that center around human experience get lots of use. Of course thermal physics insights of the last century have shown that reciprocal temperature (1/kT) has applications that temperature addresses less well. In addition to taking on negative absolute values under population inversion (e.g. of magnetic spins), bits and bytes turn 1/kT into an informatic measure of the thermal ambient for developing correlations within any complex system. We show here that, in the human-friendly units of bytes and food Calories, water freezes when 1/kT ~200 ZB/Cal or kT ~5 Cal/YB. Casting familiar benchmarks into these terms shows that habitable human space requires coldness values (part of the time, at least) between 0 and 40 ZB/Cal with respect body temperature ~100 degrees F, a range in kT of ~1 Cal/YB. Insight into these physical quantities underlying thermal equilibration may prove useful for budding scientists, as well as the general public, in years ahead.