Misconceptions about heat

In today's video Dr Derek Muller of Veritasium takes a few minutes to again tell people that they're wrong. He seems to do that a lot. I'm not saying, but I'm just saying...

The informality of the testing that he does is one of Muller's great advantages since it leaves the viewer fairly well able to reproduce many of the experiments that he does. Yeah, he uses an infrared thermometer here, but that's not radically out of the realm of expenses for most folks.

The testing today is looking at whether a book - apparently an Asimov tome - is warmer or cooler than an aluminum-cased hard drive. The trick is that they're both at room temperature...the same temperature. It's just that the two materials transfer heat very differently.

There's a similar video with slightly higher production value also by Dr Muller over on the Catalyst, an ABC Australia program, website. The video there is downloadable but not embeddable, and it does have a nice transcript of the prettier video. They also have a larger version of the downloadable video, but it's not viewable in the US. It does, however, come with some teacher material.