Université de Debrecen

The cooling or warming of objects warmer or colder than their environment to the ambient temperature does not take the same amount of time. The physical law describing the speed of this phenomenon is now called Newton's Law of Cooling in science. Isaac Newton was the first scientist to describe a nonlinear relationship between the change in temperature of a cooling object and the change in time in an article published anonymously in Latin in 1701 – without a calculation formula.

István Árpád, an assistant professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering (MK) of the University of Debrecen (UD), and two of his colleagues recently examined the literature and the heat transfer textbooks’ descriptions of this process as well as the formula used today for calculations, which was developed as a result of the work of numerous scientists over the past three centuries.