Original figure description: A drawing of a person standing while holding a paper on which appear to be data tables. In the background are various instruments including flasks and pumps.
Eunice Newton Foote was the first to determine the relationship between carbon dioxide, water vapor, and the potential for global heating. She designed and conducted a number of experiments to uncover the ability of different gases to trap heat, describing what would later be referred to as greenhouse gases. (credit: Carlyn Iverson, NOAA Climate.gov)
Energy can exist in many forms and heat is one of the most intriguing. Heat is often hidden, as it only exists when in transit, and is transferred by a number of distinctly different methods. Heat transfer touches every aspect of our lives and helps us understand how the universe functions. It explains the chill we feel on a clear breezy night, or why Earth’s core has yet to cool. This chapter defines and explores heat transfer, its effects, and the methods by which heat is transferred. These topics are fundamental, as well as practical, and will often be referred to in the chapters ahead.
Attribution. College Physics 2e, OpenStax, Rice University, and the contributing authors credited in the book. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Source revision f98d7a7921 of openstax/osbooks-college-physics-bundle (2026-02-04). CC BY 4.0. Original source ↗. Text edition of a pinned CC BY 4.0 source revision of the OpenStax book, converted from CNXML by the EvidenceHelix importer. Original prose, learning objectives, tables, exercises, glossary and captions are preserved; images are not copied (figures link to the original source and keep their credits). No new content was added. Later revisions of this book can carry different licence terms and are not used.