Is Cooling Exponential?

Introduction

We often model temperature change as an exponential process: According to Newton's law of cooling, the object temperature approaches the ambient temperature (e.g., room temperature) exponentially. But Newton's law of cooling is only a model; how accurate is it? We examine a dataset and compare it against Newton's law. We do the analysis using RStudio, an open-source front end and development environment for the statistical language R [RStudio 2016].