ABSTRACT
Cooling is as important as heating-at least. Cooling is needed to make buildings comfortable, and it is necessary for the preservation of food and for innumerable other purposes. Yet cooling is seldom talked about as much as it deserves to be, and one problem in that respect is with language. We provide warmth to heat a room, but what do we provide if we want to make it cool? Is it “coolth”? This word is not entirely unknown in English but is archaic and arcane at best. We have chosen to speak of “coolness” in this chapter. Coolness can be obtained by many techniques, and two are of particular interest for this book: the coolness connected with prevention of excessive temperatures through reection of incoming solar radiation by surfaces having high albedo (“whiteness”), and the coolness that can be captured under a clear sky-that is, what we referred to as “sky cooling” in earlier chapters.
