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This chapter, for the most part, deals with extremes extremes of temperature and the consequences. Depending on where you are as you are reading this page, presumably you are fairly comfortable temperature-wise. If you are in a room at some reasonable room temperature, the walls of the room are also at room temperature. Moreover, the walls of the room are emitting thermal radiation, some of which you are absorbing, even though you are not really aware of it. On the order hand, if the temperature of the walls of the room were to suddenly jump to 3000 K (hypothetically), you most certainly would be aware of it. The radiative energy from the walls would suddenly become unbearable. This is perhaps a ridiculous example, but it serves to get your attention about the large amount of thermal radiation that is associated with high temperatures.

As noted in Sec. 1.3.4, the shock layer in the nose region of the Apollo reentry capsule reached 11,000 K during its return through the Earth s atmosphere. Now this is an extreme temperature, and the gas in the shock layer emitted a lot of radiative energy. The energy radiated from the gas had two major physical consequences: 1) the shock layer lost energy to its surroundings, that is, the shock layer became nonadiabatic, and 2) radiative heat transfer to the body constituted over 30% of the total heating rate to the...