Why is it that warm food/drinks get cold when left out but cold food/drinks get warm when left out?
In: Physics
Heat is really just movement. when something is hot, it’s molecules are moving (or vibrating if it’s solid) faster than something that is colder. When a hot things touches a cold things, it “bumps” colder thing making it move faster but slowing it down in the process.
What this adds up to is whenever a hot thing is near a cold thing, the hot thing will get colder and the cold thing hotter until they reach the same temperature. For drink of food, the hotter or colder thing is the air and other stuff around it, and there is a lot of air, so it doesn’t really change the change of temperature if it that much because there is so much of it. The food is much smaller, so it loses or gains that heat much more obviously.
For those more informed, I am not covering radiant heat here, but I don’t consider that necessary for a basic understanding.
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