Why does aluminum foil never get hot to the touch. You can leave it in the oven and touch it directly out of the oven without it feeling hot. Why is this?
In: Physics
The reasons are twofold.
On the materials side, a lot of people are getting at the gist of it: a thin sheet of aluminum doesn’t have a lot of thermal energy. That’s just a property of aluminum, and also due to the fact that there’s not a lot.
The biological side is being neglected, though. You have nerve endings that measure the *movement* of thermal energy; they don’t measure raw temperature. That’s why a hot shower turns warm, and that’s where the saying about a frog in a pot comes from. Since aluminum foil doesn’t have a lot of energy to transfer, it’s hardly gonna register in your nerves.
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