If you left the refrigerator door open, what would happen to the room temperature and why?
Asked by: Sophie
Answer
The room would get warmer! Think of a refrigerator as a device that transfers heat from
inside a box to its surroundings. The room around a refrigerator is warmed as it receives
the heat removed from inside the box.
If you leave the door open, heat is merely recycled from the room into the refrigerator,
then back into the room. A net room temperature increase would result from the heat of the
motor that would be constantly running to move energy around in a circle. It would be like
hooking up a water pump to remove water from your basement and routing the discharge tube
back to the basement.
Answered by: Paul Walorski, B.A. Physics, Part-time Physics Instructor
'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '