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Is is possible to completely prevent heat from escaping from a closed container? Here is a diagram of vacuum flask, which tries to implement the design -

vacuum flask

Vacuum Flask prevents heat from escaping in all three forms - radiation by radiant barrier and convection and conduction by vacuum.

But despite of this, there is always some heat loss. In a hypothetical situation (provided that you have all materials required), is it possible to completely prevent heat escape from a closed container?

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  • $\begingroup$ In theoretical physics it suffices to say that the bottle is perfectly isolated. I don't think you can implement that in practice since there are all kinds of flaws in a material/design that you cannot possibly foresee. $\endgroup$
    – Gonenc
    Jun 30, 2015 at 8:35
  • $\begingroup$ No, it's not possible, but we have developed experimental techniques which are extremely good at keeping heat out of cryostats. "Superinsulation" is one of them, it's basically your thermos flask on steroids. By using many layers of very thin, highly reflective plastic foil we can reduce radiation to an extremely small fraction of the heat load on the outside of a cryostat. $\endgroup$
    – CuriousOne
    Jun 30, 2015 at 8:41

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In today's understanding of Nature, there is nothing completely isolated. So technically there will always be interaction with the surrounding, at least from a quantum physical perspective. Here vacuum is not empty i.e. it does allow for electromagnetic interaction and there will be heat loss due to these vacuum effects. Furthermore also the other concepts as convection and conduction are idealized descriptions only valid on classical level.

My answer would be: no chance, however you can reduce the heat loss that it will be very small, may be negligible small on macroscopic scales.

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