Explain it to me like I’m five.
How can I sit in a 190 degree sauna for 20 minutes and be comfortable but any hot tub higher than 104 degrees is unsafe, 150 degree water leaves burns on your skin.
In: Biology
Steam is about 0.58kg/m^(3). Liquid water is about 1000kg/m^(3). If you were to condense 1 cubic meter of steam (580 grams), you would end up with a little over 2 cups of water.
Consider the amount of energy that takes 2 cups of water, and then imagine all that energy spread over a cubic meter instead of just those 2 cups. You can see that the energy is *very* spread out. Not much of it is going to find its way into your body compared to if you were soaking in a hot tub.
Air is insulating (e.g. there is a layer of air in Thermos bottles). Water is a conductor (e.g. used to transport heat across a central heating system.)
Different materials are better and worse than others at transferring heat energy to other materials.
Water isn’t particularly good at this, but it’s far better at it than air – so it takes longer from heat energy in the air to transfer to your skin/lungs/etc. If you were to lie on a 190 degree metal table, you’d almost instantly get burned.
Here’s a table with the thermal conductivity of different substances just to give you an idea of how much different some of these are: https://www.techglads.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Thermal-conductivity-different-materials-at-300K.png
Heat transfers very quickly through *conduction*, which is when a hot thing is touching a cold thing and the heat flows into the cold thing through that touch.
Gases aren’t very dense and don’t touch your skin nearly as much. Gases are very good insulators because of this. So even though the air is very hot, it’s not touching you enough to transfer a lot of heat to you very quickly.
Water, on the other hand, is way more dense and touches your skin *a lot* so it transfers heat *very* quickly to you.
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