Why do steel handle bars feel colder than rubber handle bars?

Answer 1

Steel metal is a high temperature conductor. Rubber is a bad one.

When you touch anything, your skin can receive or give thermal energy.

A metal bar exposed to the ambient, the same for the ruber handle, are exactly at the same temperature, if both are in the shade.

When you touch the steel metal, your hand is hotter and thermal energy is transferred from your skin to the metal easier than transfer the same energy to the rubber.

During the transfer of such energy your skin thermal sensors detect loss of temperature and inform your brain that the "outside world" is colder. In fact it is colder. Your hand skin is around 95F while the steel metal bar in regular ambient temperature is around 75F.

So your skin report a loss of 20F to your brain, you feel cold.

When touching the rubber, very little thermal energy is transferred, and most of your hand own temperature is bounced back from the rubber to your own hand, so you feel it warm, no energy loss, so you feel it warmer, it is not, it is also at 75F, but you can't feel it.

This is why you use bad temperature conductors in the winter, so your own body temperature, that is being produced every second, is bouced back to your body without losing it to the ambient, it accumulates more and more and you feel warm, to a point that from time to time you need to refrigerate a bit to not overheat.

It is a bad popular concept that a coat warms you, it is not, it just avoid your own body temperature to be lost. If you wrap a rock with your winter coat, it will not get warm, because the rock is cold and will have no thermal energy to be reflected and accumulated.

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