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Mendeleev.com ยท Everyday science
Why does metal feel colder?
Metal and wood can be at the same temperature but feel very different to your hand.
What is happening?
Your skin senses heat transfer, not temperature alone. If an object is cooler than your hand, thermal energy flows from your skin into it.
Metals conduct heat well, so they carry that energy away from the contact point quickly. Wood and many plastics conduct heat much more slowly.
What changes it?
The faster heat leaves your skin, the colder the object tends to feel. If the metal is hotter than your hand, the same high conductivity makes it feel hot very quickly.
The useful idea
Everyday objects make the mechanism visible because several effects happen at once. Separating temperature, pressure, material and surface effects helps explain what you actually observe.