Conduction: Heat Through Contact

When you stir soup with a metal spoon, the handle gets hot. That's conduction — heat traveling through a material by molecule-to-molecule contact.

Here's how it works: the hot soup makes molecules at the tip of the spoon vibrate faster. Those molecules bump into their neighbors, passing energy along. Those neighbors bump into their neighbors. It's a chain reaction up the handle, all the way to your hand.

Some materials conduct heat well (metals, especially copper and aluminum). Others are terrible conductors (wood, plastic, air). We call the terrible ones insulators.