Holmes thought very carefully. Luckily, he was a former student of calculus teacher Mrs. Filter so he was able to recognize the relationship between the temperature readings. He knew that it would be possible to figure out what time the murder occurred by using a certain mathematical formula. Watson, on the other hand, was very impatient and tired of waiting in suspense. “Holmes,” he said, exasperated, “isn’t it a waste of time to measure the temperature? It’s obviously going to change. Numbers won’t tell you who murdered the victim.” “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes,” Holmes responded, “You know my methods, Watson. Have you never heard of Newton’s Law of Cooling?” Watson was silent. “Did you pass calculus, Watson?” Watson …show more content…
Newton’s Law of Cooling tells us that the rate of change of an object’s temperature is proportional to the difference between its own temperature and the surrounding temperature.” He paused to let Watson make sense of what he just said before continuing, “By using the temperature of the room at the murder, the temperature of a live human, and the temperatures of the body as it cooled, we will be able to discover the culprit.” Watson pulled out a TI-84 graphing calculator to calculate as Holmes spelled out the formula and the steps. Holmes summarized, “You plug the original temperature of the room into the equation. Then you need to find the constant and the rate which you can find by using the temperature readings. You will eventually get that the time equals negative six and a quarter. This time is when the murder occurred!” Watson was very confused, “Time can’t be negative, Holmes.” Holmes nodded, “You are correct, my dear Watson. Luckily for us, the negative only indicates that the murder occurred six and a quarter hours before the first reading at 4:30 a.m. Therefore, we can reason that the murder occurred at 10:15