Thanks again to Martha for organizing a fun trip.  Only one visit from the
man in blue this year!  And the weather was great.  Sunny and warm (60s F)
during the day and clear and warm (about 4000 F) at night.

I looked up specific heat in britannica on line today:

specific heat,

     ratio of the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of a
body one degree to that required to raise the temperature of an equal mass
of water one degree. The term is also used in a narrower sense to mean the
amount of heat, in calories, required to raise the temperature of one gram
of a substance by one Celsius degree. The Scottish scientist Joseph  Black,
in the 18th century, noticed that equal masses of different substances
needed different amounts of heat to raise them through the same temperature
interval, and, from this observation, he founded the concept of specific
heat. In the early 19th century the French physicists Pierre-Louis Dulong
and Alexis-Th=E9r=E8se  Petit demonstrated that measurements of specific=
 heats
of substances allow calculation of their atomic weights (see Dulong-Petit
law). See also heat capacity.

Copyright (c) 1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All Rights Reserved

I don't thing it has anything directly due to the amount of heat needed to
change states. That would be heat of vaporization or heat of crystallization
or even heat of sublimation.
_______________

John Huguenard
'81 Westy (Dino)
hugie@lindy.stanford.edu