Why can tinfoil be touched immediately after coming out of a super hot (hundreds of degrees) oven?
In: Other
It isn’t the temperature of the object you touch that burns you, it’s the temperature it’s able to bring your skin to via conduction that determines how bad your burn is. Tinfoil can be blazing hot, but it’s very thin. So, when you touch it, the heat gets conducted into your finger, but since your finger has so much more thermal mass, the heat spreads out, and your skin never actually gets that hot. Also, it doesn’t hurt that tinfoil has so much surface area relative to its mass that any heat in it can get carried away by convection within seconds of coming out of the oven.
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