*[Note: I’m European and have no idea how Fahrenheit degrees work, so all the temperatures mentioned in this post will be Celsius degrees]*
A nice example of this is room temperature water. Like even if the temperature is not that hot and even tho your internal temperature is much higher the water is perceived as warm.
Water at 80 degrees will probably burn you immediately but saunas easily reach those temperatures and nothing happens to you, you just sweat like a draft horse.
Going on the colder side, you can go outside in a t-shirt for a few minutes in the snow without having much discomfort other than shivering a bit, but try to swim in a 2-3 degrees pool and you probably won’t be able to be in it for more than a couple seconds at the first try.
In: Physics
Water is about 830 times denser than air. This means your skin comes into contact with many more water molecule in a given time than air molecules and thus have more opportunities to deposit or remove heat energy from your skin. Air molecules are far apart and bumb into each other less often and therefore transmit thermal energy slower. You can’t really feel absolute temperature but you can feel change in temperature
We don’t actually feel the temperature of the things we touch. What we experience as “hot” or “cold” is movement of heat into our out of our bodies. Liquids have a much greater capacity to move heat than gases. So touching a liquid moves heat in or out of your body much faster than touching a gas.
Liquids conduct temperature much better than gases, because their atoms are closer together. Temperature is just atoms bumping around. Higher density, more atoms in a volume, more bumping.
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