Conduction

Look at these delicious and yummy cookies. But have you ever wondered how they baked so perfectly? The answer is conduction.

Conduction happens when heat moves through objects in contact.

This is what happens when we bake cookies. The cookie sheet heats up, transferring heat to the dough and baking the cookies evenly.

Now, consider a metal spoon in a hot cup of soup. If you leave it there for a while, the spoon gets hot, right?

That’s because heat from the soup moves up the spoon through conduction.

Let’s look at a few more examples to understand conduction at the particle level.

When you hold a mug of hot chocolate, your hands feel warm.

The mug’s particles gain energy from the hot liquid inside and vibrate faster. These particles then transfer energy to your skin through direct contact, warming your hands.

Similarly, imagine a metal rod. When one end is heated, the particles at that end start vibrating more vigorously.

These vibrations are passed to the neighboring particles, transferring heat along the rod.