Humans can’t feel wet, what we’re actually feeling is cold. It’s why when you have a cold patch on a blanket or carpet you can’t quite figure out if it’s wet or not.
It’s actually an even greater level of abstraction: we feel the rate of heat flow through our skin. This is (kind-of) why plastic feels warmer than metal. Colder things don’t feel colder because they are colder. Colder things feel colder because they more efficiently sap heat from our skin. Wet things feel colder because water and other highly conductive fluids which have wet the skin (and are thus in direct contact with it) are much more efficient in removing heat, thus feeling colder. This is the twofold reason why oil doesn’t feel as cold as water: it has significantly worse heat conductivity, and it doesn’t readily evaporate (as evaporation is a highly endothermic process, sapping heat even more efficiently than a conductive liquid on its own.)
I feel like that’s like “you can’t see or touch the world or experience time, your eyeballs and molecules that never touch anything are just affected by magnetic and gravitational waves and translate that to feeling and experiencing those things”
Like I guess it’s technically true in that perspective, but effectively false
Humans can’t feel wet, what we’re actually feeling is cold. It’s why when you have a cold patch on a blanket or carpet you can’t quite figure out if it’s wet or not.
It’s actually an even greater level of abstraction: we feel the rate of heat flow through our skin. This is (kind-of) why plastic feels warmer than metal. Colder things don’t feel colder because they are colder. Colder things feel colder because they more efficiently sap heat from our skin. Wet things feel colder because water and other highly conductive fluids which have wet the skin (and are thus in direct contact with it) are much more efficient in removing heat, thus feeling colder. This is the twofold reason why oil doesn’t feel as cold as water: it has significantly worse heat conductivity, and it doesn’t readily evaporate (as evaporation is a highly endothermic process, sapping heat even more efficiently than a conductive liquid on its own.)
This is so cool to know!!! Thank you!
I feel like that’s like “you can’t see or touch the world or experience time, your eyeballs and molecules that never touch anything are just affected by magnetic and gravitational waves and translate that to feeling and experiencing those things”
Like I guess it’s technically true in that perspective, but effectively false