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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Both are colder than your body temperature, but wood will cool your feet down slower than tile because wood is a better insulator and tile is a better heat conductor.
If the room was hotter than your body temperature, the effect would be the opposite (tiles would be super hot and wood would be more manageable, which is why saunas are made of wood).
We feel cold when something his taking heat from our body. A cast iron pan at room temperature will be cold, for example.
The tile and the wood are the same temperature in the same room. But the physical makeup of ceramic is such that it’s a better conductor of heat. Thus it’s pulling more heat out of your feet than the wood. You feel this as coldness
Both are colder than your body temperature, but wood will cool your feet down slower than tile because wood is a better insulator and tile is a better heat conductor.
If the room was hotter than your body temperature, the effect would be the opposite (tiles would be super hot and wood would be more manageable, which is why saunas are made of wood).
What you’re sensing is not their temperature but their thermal conductivity. It’s the same reason why a plastic bottle and a glass bottle may feel like they have a different temperature when you touch them, even if they have the same.
We feel cold when something his taking heat from our body. A cast iron pan at room temperature will be cold, for example.
The tile and the wood are the same temperature in the same room. But the physical makeup of ceramic is such that it’s a better conductor of heat. Thus it’s pulling more heat out of your feet than the wood. You feel this as coldness
What you’re sensing is not their temperature but their thermal conductivity. It’s the same reason why a plastic bottle and a glass bottle may feel like they have a different temperature when you touch them, even if they have the same.
You’re not actually feeling how hot or cold a thing is when you touch it. You’re feeling the exchange of thermal energy. Touching something warmer than you will feel hot because your body is absorbing the heat. Touching something colder than you will feel cold because heat is leaving your body. How hot or cold these things are depends on how fast the heat exchange is. More conductive materials (metal) will exchange heat faster than insulating materials (wood)
So the ceramic floor “feels” cold because it is absorbing heat from your foot faster than the wood floor.
It’s because some materials like sucking up heat more than others, and tile likes sucking up heat more than wood. When the tile sucks the heat out of the bottom of your feet, it feels like it’s cold, but wood doesn’t like sucking heat out of your feet, so your feet don’t lose their heat so they feel warm.
We feel cold when something his taking heat from our body. A cast iron pan at room temperature will be cold, for example.
The tile and the wood are the same temperature in the same room. But the physical makeup of ceramic is such that it’s a better conductor of heat. Thus it’s pulling more heat out of your feet than the wood. You feel this as coldness
Compare it to bigger extremes – room temperature carpet and room temperature garage floors.
The reason is that garage floors’ surfaces transfer heat from your feet much quicker than carpet.
Back to your two less extreme examples – they simply transfer heat at different rates.
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