Heat Repelled by Cold?

The heat is traveling by conduction......the steel rod is more conductive than the water, therefore the heat travels up the rod faster than into the water.

If you were to do this with an aluminum rod, it would be even more pronounced.

Your experiment needs a control.

'Cherry red' is really not a quantity, but if two steel rods are heated the same amount of time by the same heat source, it should be close enough for this experiment.

Conduct the experiment again with two rods. Quench one rod but not the other. MEASURE the temperatures of the rods at a given length after measured amounts of time. Compare these resulting temp/time graphs, and advise us of your findings.

<...It is an accepted rule that heat flows form hot to cold,but there are particular instances where this rule is apparently broken, or at least modified:...>

Only where the Laws of Thermodynamics do not apply!

In fact what you describe is completely NORMAL but it has to be explained the right way:

-the very hot end comming in contact with water will vaporize it and as you know water vapour has a low heat transfer coeddficient so that the heat from the still hot end is not send to the environment and has the time to travel along the rod to your hand and burn it. This time dependent temperature migration is quantified by a value called heat diffusibility which is proportional to the ratio between conductivity and cp of the material since steel has a relatively high conductivity and a low cp the diffusibility is important and heat travels fast! Air around the rod is a good thermal insulator so that losses are small and you feel it at your hand.

It is NO change of the rule ONLY a misunderstanding of what happpens.

I hope the bit of theory will allow a better understanding.

Thank you. Very well put.

The heat actually flows both ways in your example. It's common when hardening a chisel to heat the end, quench the very end, then pull it out and let some of the heat from the middle flow back to give the desired temper before quenching the whole thing. At that point you'll find both ends pretty hot.

Why is the heat transfer up the rod faster when you quench the end than when you don't?

Even when moving the rod around to prevent water vaporizing at the point of contact.

It appears as if the heat is being "driven" or repelled away from the hot tip at a faster rate than normal.

It isn't faster. Show me some proof.

If your rod end has a temperature > 100°C at its surface water will change phase as soon as its temperature goes over the border. The vaour film can be so thin that you cannot see it and in contact with cooler water it will become again liquid.

Of course if you want to discover new laws of physics as several participants you are welcome but then you should do "measurements" since all laws quantitative have been determined by measurements done with instruments which are objective and independent of the skin thickness.

What I noticed is a blindness of those who believe to have discovered a new principle and a total rejection of comments not supporting their ideas. It is not a shame to have made an error or to have misunderstood something on the contrary it is a shame to refuse other opinions. What I also noticed is that those who "discover" have a very low scientific level of knowledge and are in fact handicapped when more complex explanations are given. may be we do not always find the right way to explain where is the problem.

What is probably happening is very small pockets around the tip are flashing to steam and moving up the rod. Surface tention keeps most of the pockets in contact with the rod. Some heat is transfered to the surrounding liquid, but the metal rod is a better conductor, so further up on the rod, where it is cooler, the steam pocket transfers sufficient heat causing it to collapse, at which time the liquid that was around the steam pocket slams into the rod. (This is what you are feeling in the rod as it is quenched.) .. . . . . . . . . . . . Since nucleate boiling and convection are highly effective heat transfer modes, it is possible the temperature up the rod may increase more rapidly when the very hot lower end is quenched. . . . . . . Bbb .. . . . . . . . flee to me remote elf

I would like to make a comment on the way your OP was written:

That heat flows from high temperature to lower is NOT an accepted rule, it is a general basic principle that a "flow goes from higher potential to lower". In heat transfer the potential is temperature.

In a water flow the potential is -in the gravitational field - the height or in general pressure, in electricity it is the number of free charges available at the conductor end, aso.

If the process could go from lower to higher potential no live would be possible since as soon as a body would be warmer than environment its heat quantity will increase till destruction.

The trend is always to obtain the lowest level of potential energy of the system and this brings STABILITY!