(2225) Summer: Light or dark?
Eva Conrad
Westmount

Abstract


I am trying to confim that if you wear dark clothes in the summer, you will get hotter than if you wear pale clothes because darker colours absorb more heat. Here's how I'm doing it ... First of all you find different coloured paints (some light and some dark) and paint some tubes the different colours. Then you get normal tap water and measure the temperature with a thermometer. Then you take the tap water and pour 45 mL into each of the differently coloured tubes. Place the tubes in the sun for one hour. After one hour you remove the tubes from the sun and take the temperature of the water in each tube. Then you record the results. You see if the darker colours' temperature is higher than the paler colours' temperature. If the water in the tubes with darker colours is hotter than the water in the tubes with paler colours, that confirms that pale colours reflect light and darker colours absorb light. If some pale colours were hotter and some darker colours the same temperature as the pale colours, then that suggests that it's not the lightness or darkness at all, it's the colours themselves!