How do warm clothes keep us warm? Shouldn’t heat be expelled outside nevertheless?
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Imagine a bucket with a massive hole in the bottom. It loses water super fast, right? Now imagine we made that hole smaller. You lose water, but not as fast. If we had a hose pumping water into the bucket, we could even make the water level *rise* if we made the hole small enough.
This is how clothes work. Your body is constantly producing heat. The idea of clothes is to limit how quickly that heat escapes the area around your body. If you can limit that rate to slower than your body produces heat, you can stay warm.
Heat *is* expelled outside.
Heat (or more precisely, warmed air) is then trapped by our clothes and retained closer to our skin.
We can’t magically manifest the heat outside the layers we’re wearing.
Because Heat can only be transferred 3 ways. Conduction, convection, and radiation.
Conduction is heat transferred between two things that are directly touching. Convection is heat being transferred by air or a fluid moving, like wind blowing or ocean currents. And radiation, where heat is literally radiated out into space as infrared radiation.
The way we lose most of our heat is through a Mix of conduction and convection.
Air touches our skin and absorbs some of our heat (conduction). That air then gets blown away and replaced by new colder air to absorb more of our heat (convection.).
By wearing clothing you stop that second person from happening, the clothing holds the warm air close to your body and stops the wind from blowing it away and replacing it with colder air. Which helps keep you warm.
You do still lose some heat gradually, but by trapping the warm air inside a jacket you won’t lose the heat as fast.
Your body like is a heat engine. You are alive because your body consumes energy, some of which is transformed into heat.
A jacket slows the rate at which your body loses heat.
If your body creates heat faster than the jacket loses heat, then you stay warm.
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