Why does it feel warmer to walk barefoot over wooden floors than to walk over ceramic tiles even if both are side-by-side in the same room?
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How warm or cold something feels depends on how fast the heat is being taken away from you.
Your body constantly produces heat, so it needs to constantly get rid of heat. If it doesn’t get rid of enough heat, you’ll feel warm. If a lot of heat gets “sucked out” of your body, you will feel cold.
Heat transfer between your feet and wood is slower than heat transfer between feet and ceramic tiles, hence wood feels warmer.
Different materials have different thermal properties, so heat transfer goes at different rates depending on the material.
Also, a fun fact related to this – if you put an ice cube on a ceramic floor, it will melt quicker than on wood despite the tiles feeling colder. The reason is the same – there’s faster heat transfer going on between the ceramic tile and ice cube compared the wooden floor.
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