Why do things you touch feel cold when they're the same temperature as the air?

Question

I walked into my house today and the doorknob felt significantly chilly... yet I didn't feel cold from the air. When I hold my hand out in the open air, why doesn't it feel as cold as my door knob?

Answer 1

The temperature-sensitive nerve endings in your skin detect the difference between your inside body temperature and your outside skin temperature. When your skin cools down, your temperaturesensitive nerves tell you that the object you are touching is cold. An object that feels cold must be colder than your hand, and it must carry your body heat away so that your skin cools down.

Styrofoam and metal are two materials that work well for this Snack. They both start at room temperature and are both colder than your hand. They do not feel equally cold because they carry heat away from your hand at different rates.

Styrofoam is an insulator, a very poor conductor of heat. When your hand touches the Styrofoam, heat flows from your hand to the Styrofoam and warms the Styrofoam surface. Because this heat is not conducted away quickly, the surface of the Styrofoam soon becomes as warm as your hand, so little or no additional heat leaves your hand. There is no difference in temperature between the inside of your body and the outside of your skin, so the temperature-sensitive nerves detect no difference in temperature. The Styrofoam feels warm.

The metal, in contrast, carries heat away quickly. Metal is a good conductor of heat. Heat flows from your hand into the metal and then is conducted rapidly away into the bulk of the metal, leaving the metal surface and your skin surface relatively cool. That's why metal feels cool.

Answer 2

The moon has very dramatic changes in temperature because it has no atmosphere to produce the greenhouse effect produced on Earth. Even though Mt. Everest is very high in altitude, there is still the same amount of air, just that the oxygen is spread out more, making it more difficult to breathe. Also, since the moon has no atmosphere, the heat from the sun cannot be reflected, thereby making the moon very hot during the day.

Answer 3

Air is a poor conductor of heat. Heat will transfer from your hand when touching metal much faster than "Touching" air. That transfer is what says "Cold" to your sensory nerves

The whole sensation of hot or cold is based on your body temperature. The knob, or any other solid that you touch, that is colder than the surface temperature of your hand or fingers, will feel cold. Conversly, things warmer than you are will feel anything from simply warm to uncomfortably hot.

Answer 4

Are u not aware that our body temperature always remain constant both in hot and cold weather? Our body temperature being higher than the surrounding we feel cold when we touch things.

Answer 5

Metal conducts heat easily. When you touched it heat was conducted away from your touch.

Air is not a good conductor of heat, that is why some insulation involved pockets of still air, such as double pane windows.

Answer 6

That's because different things are made of different materials and therefore conduct temperatures differently. It's as much about the temperature of the air / room as it is the material (metal / non-metal, etc) that the object is made of.

Answer 7

This happens because tour body temperature is usually hotter than the air/doornob temp.

Answer 8

being the fact that we and you have blood and a lot of other warm hot stuff in us we stay warm but the doorknob, unfortunatly does not have this cool stuff so it will be kinda cool.

Answer 9

thermal conductivity.
The air only felt warm because
you very probably wearing shoes,
not because it was really that warm.

Answer 10

Because you have body heat...the knob does not have knob heat...:-)