A Brief History of Fire, Heat and Their Manifestations in Remote Sensing

Abstract:

The discovery of fire was one of the earliest of human discoveries. At the beginning, man sensed heat on his skin and then perceived the concept of fire and temperature. Fire and its manifestation in form of light and heat have contributed in many literary sources and religious books. It has being interpreted in various manners and construed by different explanations. Some of these definitions have resemblances with today’s human findings in the argument about heat, temperature, light and their spectra. In this work, we reviewed a broad range of literary, historical, religious and cultural sources to gain deeper insight into the meaning of fire and heat in human’s thought, beliefs and myths from the past to today. We found a close linkage between predecessor’s perception and impression about heat and what is known today as thermal energy. It should be mentioned that we strictly deny the claim of their awareness of modern concepts such as energy or thermodynamics. However, we interfere that they perceived these conceptions. We cannot clearly explain how our predecessor shaped their impression about fire and heat without any knowledge of the nature of new science such as energy, temperature and thermal remote sensing. Nevertheless, their though compromise with modern science. According to the recent findings, temperature play important role as an efficient indicator of sustainability in landscape. Magnitude and distribution of temperature and its changes over time - which could be traced by thermal remote sensing- are of great importance. A concise literature review relating to fire and heat will broaden our knowledge about temperature and thermal remote sensing.