<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> What?! You've been WRONG?!  That's funny - so have I!  What a coincidence! With regard to the sun heating us up:  I find it helpful to use this analogy:  Imagine I am standing a little distance from you, and you are lobbing great quantities of tennis balls at me, hard and fast.  When they hit my skin, I experience pain, redness and irritation.  Medical instruments can be used to measure the degrees of pain, redness and irritation of the skin.  Now, you are not throwing pain, redness and irritation at me; you are throwing tennis balls.  (Their number, mass and velocity can be measured with instruments too, of course). The pain, redness and irritation my skin undergoes, is the result of its interaction with the tennis balls, not a property of the balls themselves.  Imagine that instead of tennis balls, it was glass marbles, and then steel ballbearings.  Thier effects might be more severe; heavy bruising, maybe broken bones. The sun constantly chucks out untold squillions of particles into space. They are of various "sizes" and/or "weights" and are called Quanta.  Quanta also have wave properties.  Some of them, of particular sizes/wavelengths, interact with our retinas to produce the phenomenon we call Light. Those particular quanta are called Photons.  Many of the particles from the sun interact with the matter of Earth and our bodies, to excite molecules in a manner we call Heat.  That's how the sun heats things up. "Heat" is not a form of energy in and of itself emanating from the sun. (Nor is space, tho' very empty, quite entirely a vacuum). The combined effect of all these particles shooting out of the sun at 186000 miles per second also exerts a pressure on the surface of the earth. It's known as the Solar Wind. Somehow we have moved from an old birdcage piano to Quantum Physics! Best regards, David. <div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/12/2012 16:03, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:pianotech-request@ptg.org">pianotech-request@ptg.org</a> wrote: </div> <blockquote cite="mid:mailman.4389.1355328183.4133.pianotech@ptg.org" type="cite"> We get heat from the sun, even though there are no molecules in space to transfer it. Heat is pure energy transferred between bodies. Apply a given amount of heat to low mass molecules, such as helium, and they will move proportionally faster and thus be hotter in temperature than the same amount of heat applied to a carbon molecule. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> At least that is my understanding, and I’ve been wrong before. </blockquote> </body> </html>