Specific heat capacity — how much energy it takes to warm 1 kg of a substance by 1 K, and why water and metals behave so differently when heated.
Specific latent heat — the "hidden" energy needed to change state (melt or boil something) without changing its temperature at all.
Core Practical 12 — calibrating a thermistor, i.e. turning a resistance reading into a trustworthy temperature reading.
Core Practical 13 — experimentally measuring the specific latent heat of fusion of ice, including how to correct for heat lost to the surroundings using a control funnel.
Every substance is made of particles that are constantly jiggling around — vibrating in a solid, sliding past each other in a liquid, or zooming freely in a gas. Heat energy is just the total kinetic and potential energy tied up in all that jiggling.
When you pump heat energy into a substance, the particles move faster on average. We measure "how fast the particles are moving on average" using temperature. So more heat in → faster particles → higher temperature. Simple so far.
But here's the catch that trips people up: not every substance heats up at the same rate for the same energy input. Give copper and water the exact same amount of energy, and copper's temperature will shoot up while water barely warms at all. Why? Because different materials have different molecular structures — different numbers of ways their particles can store energy (vibrating, rotating, bond-stretching etc.), and different strengths of intermolecular bonds. Water is unusually good at "soaking up" energy without its temperature rising much — this is exactly what specific heat capacity measures.
Real-world analogy
Think of specific heat capacity like the size of a bucket. A big bucket (water, c = 4200) needs a lot of water poured in before the level (temperature) rises noticeably. A small bucket (copper, c = 390) fills up — and its level rises — much faster for the same pour. That's why a metal spoon in hot tea gets hot almost instantly, but the tea itself stays hot for ages.
Definition to know word-for-word: Specific heat capacity is the energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of a substance by one kelvin.
The temperature rise of an object heated by a certain amount of energy depends on three things:
- The amount of heat energy transferred to it
- The mass of the object (more mass = more particles to speed up = smaller temperature rise for the same energy)
- The specific heat capacity of the material it's made from