Listen to a conversation between a student and her engineering professor In class today, when we were talking about working with metal heating up metal。 you mentioned something about a vacuum furnace. So I guess that works by. They\'re designed to operate at very high temperatures without losing heat. The vacuum acts as an insulator to maintain the heat. because heat requires matter to travel through. But vacuums are empty of matter. Right? Which reminded me that other furnaces lose heat. so the calculations that I\'ve brought to show you. they might need to be redone in my design project, I didn\'t account for heat loss. Well, I\'ll look at what you\'ve done. but it is something you\'ll need to account for. unless your project includes a vacuum furnace. It doesn\'t. I actually didn\'t know there were such things as vacuum furnaces. though it makes sense. I guess that a vacuum would be good insulation. Right, it’s like those vacuum sealed thermoses that keep your coffee hot. You\'re familiar with them, right? Sure. Without a medium like a solid liquid or gas. heat can\'t travel if a container with a hot liquid is surrounded by a vacuum. there\'s no medium for heat to travel through. so the drink stays hot. But it does get cold after a few hours though. if heat can\'t move through empty space, why does that happen? Well, in your thermos, the area around the top, the part that screws off that area, probably isn\'t vacuum sealed. the coffee would get cold eventually, even if you never opened it. Plus, vacuum technology isn\'t flawless. It\'s almost impossible to create a perfect vacuum. Almost impossible? In the best lab setting you can get pretty close. But speaking of that. recent experiments have shown that there is a way for heat to transfer on a small scale, even inside a vacuum. in completely empty space. How does that work? It\'s a bit too complicated to get into right now. but the idea of heat traveling through a vacuum. a lot of engineers are puzzled. It\'s not what we learned in school about heat transfer. Yeah, I\'m taking physics right now. but we haven\'t talked much about heat, yet. we\'ve talked about how sound can\'t travel in a vacuum. That\'s why you don\'t hear sound in outer space. Does the discovery about heat have implications for sound travel as well? Huh, very good question. Experiments seem to show that. just like heat, sound might be able to travel on a very, very small scale in an empty space. You know, I think I\'ll hold on to the work I was going to show you and start over. I want to think about it some more. I\'ve got some new ideas.