Why does a piece of metal retain the ambient temperature rather than instantly heating up to millions of degrees?

So, metals. They have a very high concentration of free electrons – 6.5 x 10 to the twenty-second power of electrons per cubic centimeter. And these electrons move chaotically in the interionic space of the metal crystal lattice at speeds from 600 to 2000 km/sec. The kinetic energy of such electrons is several electron volts.

Moreover, this energy remains CONSTANT, REGARDLESS of the temperature of the metal, ranging from temperatures close to Absolute zero and up to ten thousand degrees on the Kelvin scale.

University textbooks and physical encyclopedias, of course, say exactly the opposite! It’s a complete mess. In some places, it is claimed that THE KINETIC ENERGY OF FREE ELECTRONS IN METALS DOES NOT DEPEND ON TEMPERATURE OVER A WIDE RANGE, FROM CRYOTEMPERATURES CLOSE TO ABSOLUTE ZERO (THEREFORE, THE ENERGY OF FREE ELECTRONS IS OFTEN CALLED “ZERO”), AND UP TO TEN THOUSAND DEGREES. That is, what has just been stated.

Others, just as authoritatively, “argumentatively” and categorically, declare THE OPPOSITE, that, for example, THE HEAT CAPACITY OF FREE ELECTRONS (THIS IS THE INCREASE IN THEIR KINETIC ENERGY PER UNIT TEMPERATURE INCREASE) DEPENDS ON TEMPERATURE AND THE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF METALS AT NORMAL TEMPERATURES IS DUE TO THE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF FREE ELECTRONS, AND MUCH GREATER THAN THE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF THE CRYSTAL LATTICE!

As is often the case in physics and other sciences, clever scientists have confused CAUSE and EFFECT.

Imagine such a thought experiment. Some aliens on a probe invisible to earthlings are watching people. In one large and densely populated city, an earthquake occurs, UNKNOWN to aliens, this NEVER HAPPENS on their planet! They see crowds of thousands of people fleeing the city in panic, hear the rumble coming from the soil and conclude that both the rumble and the shaking of the soil are caused by the incomprehensible RUNNING of crowds of people hitting the soil and stone slabs under it with tens and hundreds of thousands of FEET!

The same may have happened with our ideas about the role of free electrons in heat transfer. They “warm up”, they receive additional kinetic energy, and, being free, they quickly carry heat to all sides of the metal, which does not happen with dielectrics.

But the reason is different. Free electrons appeared precisely because of specifically organized overlapping electron orbits, the deformation of which, (thermal energy) it is transmitted quickly through the chains of EXTERNAL ORBITS, and free electrons do not carry any thermal energy!

In connection with the mentioned facts: Due to the high concentration, high electron velocities and the constancy of their velocity, a natural, albeit strange-looking question arises: Why do metals not self-heat almost instantly to temperatures of millions and tens of millions of degrees?

If we consider the average energy of electrons in a piece of metal equal to three electron volts (for each electron), then it is not difficult to make an approximate calculation and get that one cubic centimeter of metal should self-heat with an energy of 32.5 kWh, that is, 32.5 kilowatt hours!!!

(1ev = 1.6 x 10 to the minus nineteenth power of a watt-hour. Let’s round up the energy of each electron to five by ten in minus nineteen watt-hours. Multiply this number by the number of free electrons in one cubic centimeter of metal 6.5 x 10 to the twenty-second power. 5 x 6.5 x 1000 wh = 32.5 kWh!)

JUST ONE CUBIC CENTIMETER!

And considering the speeds of, say, a thousand kilometers per second of these six and a half by ten to the twenty-second degree free electrons in the cube, and the interatomic distances in the lattice, this enormous energy will be released not in an hour or a minute, but in micro-nano-pico-seconds!!!

Thermonuclear explosion of a cubic centimeter!

We are talking about metals, but it seems to me that something similar happens in dielectrics, where there are also “potential” free electrons, as evidenced by the phenomenon of electrification by “friction”, which has been known for thousands of years, although “friction” itself plays only the role of mechanical convergence-separation of bottom-acceptor electron dissipation, that is, scattering, distribution of electrons between two dielectrics.

The question is based on the well-known phenomenon of heating metal conductors with electric current, the so-called Joule heat. After all, if extremely slowly drifting current electrons (speeds in thousandths, hundredths, tenths of millimeters per second) can heat a metal conductor to high temperatures, then why do the same chaotically flying electrons with speeds billions of times higher than the maximum technically permissible drift velocity have no thermal effect on the metal? Their energy exceeds the energy of drifting electrons not by billions of times, but by thousands of billions of billions of times! If we accept as true the equally absurd but GENERALLY ACCEPTED position that these electrons elastically collide with lattice ions, and during drift they also collide and disperse on impurity defects of the lattice and on its thermal phonons (that is, ion vibrations), this only increases the perplexity about such a strange “gustatory” selectivity in the exchange of impulses.-the energy between free electrons and metal ions. When drifting, they collide with ions and lattice defects and give them their NEGLIGIBLE kinetic energy, and when flying chaotically with billions of billions more energy, they skimp and give NOTHING to these ions and defects!

In addition, another question arises: Why do free electrons have such high speeds at all, especially if these are the speeds of the so-called “zero energy” at the lowest cryotemperature, and they are unchanged. It’s not a bad “zero energy”, which is billions of billions of times higher than the drift energy!

Unfortunately, existing theories do not provide answers to these questions, and if they do, they are contradictory and invented ad hoc, as shown above.

We will try to give answers using two theories: the Molecular Electrical Theory and the Configurational Theory of Electron Orbits.

Free electrons have the speeds with which they rotate in the outer orbits of atoms, from which they periodically “fly off”, because the attraction to the nucleus is weak, and then they come back and fly off again… These are the velocities of free electrons and their cause.

There are no “collisions”, elastic or inelastic, with ions in the nodes of the crystal lattice, otherwise, indeed, any piece of metal would instantly evaporate with an explosion comparable in power to an atomic or hydrogen bomb and with a temperature of tens of millions of degrees. The electrons SIMPLY return to the outer atomic orbits and spontaneously, under the influence of random causes, fly off them.

The Joule heat released in a metal when current flows through it is not related to the “scattering” of drift electrons on lattice defects or its thermal fluctuations, but is caused by the MAGNETIC INTERACTION of spin magnetic fields of electrons ORIENTED in a certain (“interlocking”) way with the magnetic fields of atoms and ions of the lattice. Since any current, that is, a certain ordered movement of a cloud of free electrons, creates a vortex magnetic field, it is precisely THIS FIELD that orients the spin magnetic moments of electrons so that they begin to intensively interact with the magnetic fields of ions in the nodes of the crystal lattice, DEFORMING the ORBITS of BOUND ATOMIC ELECTRONS, that is, giving the ions additional potential energy, which is macroscopically THERMAL ENERGY. The greater the degree of deformation of the orbits and the more different orbits are deformed, the more potential energy of these orbits is given to the atom and the greater its thermal energy, that is, the “temperature” of the atom and the macrotemperature of matter.

If free electrons in metals DO NOT TRANSFER energy from place to place (because THEIR ENERGY DOES NOT DEPEND ON TEMPERATURE), then the only explanation for the thermal conductivity of metals can only be a specific “configuration” of the external electronic orbits of atoms and ions, which deform when absorbing heat and quickly transfer these deformations along the chain to neighboring atoms. This is also hinted at by the coefficient of thermal linear and volumetric expansion of metals, which is higher than that of dielectrics!

Free electrons in metals, of course, do not collide with metal ions in the nodes of the crystal lattice, but either simply fly at high speeds inside it or “land” on their “own” orbits and fly off them. That is, there are no increases or decreases in energy in general!

But flying in interionic space, their electric and magnetic fields (of dual origin – from the kinetics of electrons and their spin magnetic moments) should obviously somehow affect the orbits of bound atomic electrons.

how?

Two opposite effects:

One is the deformation of the orbits towards their accumulation of potential energy of deformation – thermal energy – HEATING!

The other is the opposite, “correcting deformed” orbits towards their “idealization”, that is, “REDEFORMATION” – returning to their “ideal state, removing the potential energy accumulated due to the deformation of the orbits – COOLING!

Moreover, in accordance with the well-known phenomenon formulated by Clausius, namely: “Heat never spontaneously passes from a cold body to a hot one,” the cooling of any system, left to itself, is predominant and universal.

The second principle of thermodynamics, formulated like Clausius’ original definition.

Since free electrons in metals move chaotically in the absence of external electric and magnetic fields, their field deformation effects on the orbits of atomic electrons are also random: Some “heat” atoms, others “cool” them.The processes are equal in amplitude and counter-directional, thus balancing each other. Of course, we are talking about a certain balance with the environment, due to which metals are in thermodynamic equilibrium with it.

From these positions, thermoelectric and thermomagnetic phenomena should be considered, in particular, additional deep cooling by demagnetization of metal samples that have already been cooled to cryotemperature.

Faciant meliora potentes.

30 X – 3 XI 2025