For example, when I walk barefoot om my room’s wooden floor, it feels colder than walking on the carpet in the same room. Or a glass feels cooler than say a piece of bread in the same environment. Why is this?
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Materials such as metal are great conductors of heat. The reason these materials feel colder to the touch is because when you touch them, the material absorbs the heat from your hand which quickly goes through the surface of the material, leaving it feeling colder.
The temperature you feel has to do with how fast heat moves into or out of your body with respect to whatever medium you’re feeling. So, medium that move heat faster, like metal, will feel hotter/colder than something that moves it slower like wood.
It’s because metal is a better heat conductor than say carpet. When you are touching metal, your body heat is being transferred at a much faster rate than if you touched carpet. The temperature that you feel it being cool is because the heat from your skin is being absorbed by the metal and being loss by your body.
We don’t detect temperatures like a thermometer based on how hot or cold it actually is, we do it based on how slowly or quickly heat enters/leaves the skin.
This means if something pulls the heat out of us faster, it will feel colder. And if something pushes heat into us faster, it will feel hotter.
Carpet insulates very well, so heat transfer will be much slower compared to a wooden floor, which will be slower than a tile floor. So a carpet will feel warmer than wood, because it pulls the heat out slower.
On the flip side, if the floor was heated up to like 50C, much hotter than your feet, the carpet would feel the coolest, because it would push the heat into your feet the slowest.
Temp you feel isn’t temp, but change in temp. Different things change temp different rates, so feel different.
Thermal conductivity, you don’t feel the temperature of material you are touching, you can’t because you don’t have any nerves in the flooring. You can only feel the temp of your own nerve endings in your feet. Standing on a cool material of poor thermal conductivity doesn’t chill down your feet as much as standing on same temperature but higher thermal conductivity material.
Temperature is a product of energy. For objects, different materials can hold different amounts of energy before radiating that energy outward as heat. It’s the same reason why you need to microwave some foods longer than others to warm them up. Even when they’re stored at the same temperatures (like next to each other in the fridge).
The same thing applies to things you don’t eat, and getting energy from other sources.
Once the ambient temperature in your house reaches about 37 (your body temp) then they will all feel the same. If it goes above 37 they will all feel the opposite of what they normally do, so things like metals will feel hotter than your carpet, etc.
Lots of good answers so far, so I’ll say the same thing, slightly differently.
In your example (your room), everything is colder than you. All the objects are “room temperature”, and your body is warmer than that. So everything you touch (the fabric carpet, the metal doorknob, the ceramic mug, the air) is absorbing heat from your skin.
What you are sensing in terms of what materials feel cooler than others is heat conductivity, the rate that each material transfers heat from the warmer surface to the cooler surface.
If you think of an example like a hot car, the hard surfaces will feel really hot while cloth seats will feel less hot, even at the same temperature.
* Because your body is hotter than objects in ur room
* some materials absorbs heat more quickly(metal), some slowly( wool/ cotton)
* the more your body loses heat, the more “cool” you feel
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