Page 141 - The Creation Of The Universe

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 139

self. Put this book aside and go take a ten-kilometer run in the blazing Sun
and see how hot your body gets.
But in fact, if you think about it you'll realize that you didn't get nearly
as hot as you should have done...
The unit of heat is the calorie. A normal person
running 10 kilometers in one hour will generate
about 1,000 calories of heat. That heat has to be dis-
charged from the body. If it weren't, you'd collapse
into coma before you finished the first kilometer.
That danger however is precluded by the sec-
ond two properties that water has.
The first of these is the thermal capacity of wa-
The thermal properties
ter. What this means is that in order to increase the of water enable us to
temperature of water, a great deal of heat is re- discharge excessive
heat from our body
quired. Water makes up about 70% of our body but
through sweating.
because of its thermal capacity, that water doesn't
get hot very fast. Imagine an action that generates a 10°C increase in bod-
ily heat. If we had alcohol instead of water in our bodies, the same action
would lead to a 20°C increase and for other substances with lower thermal
capacities the situation would be even worse: increases of 50°C for salt,
100°C for iron, and 300°C for lead. The high thermal capacity of water is
what prevents such enormous changes in heat from taking place.
But even an increase of 10°C is would be fatal as mentioned above. To
forestall that, the second property of water–its high latent heat–comes into
play.
To keep itself cool in the face of the heat that is being generated, the
body employs the sweating mechanism. When we sweat, water spreads
over the surface of the skin and quickly evaporates. But because water's la-
tent heat is so great, that evaporation requires large amounts of heat. The
heat, of course, is withdrawn from the body and thus we are kept cool.
This cooling process is so effective that it can sometimes cause us to ex-
perience a chill even when the weather is rather warm.
Because of this, someone who has run ten kilometers will reduce his