Hot or Cold ?

[BertiWooster]

It's interesting how different peoples perception of hot and cold is , in terms of the weather .

Take a hundred people , stand them outside and ask them , is it hot or cold . You will never get all to agree one way or another , i.e. it's a subjective thing .

This has got me wondering - is there a specific temperature at which a substance/material scientifically is consided to be cold / warm / hot ?

[cassa333]

Stick them all outside my house last week and they would all have said it was cold.

It is when the tempreture is almost at body temprature that your theory comes in as some people react to small changes in different ways. Warm or cool would be a more appropriate question. Old people feel the cold more easily than younger ones. Fat people tend to be warmer.

Put them all in the sahara desert in the day and they will say it is hot and on an ice burge in Alaska at night and they will say cold.

[rov1200]

Its a well known fact its due down to body fat which acts like a thermal insulator. The design of our bodies usually is adapted for our needs and if you took a sample across a failrly large sample it would show up as a Bell curve with 99.9% of the population fitting within 4 standard deviations.
If the temperature was set too low the body would have to work too hard to generate heat and allow equilibrium. If too high excess sweating would make for a depletion of the body chemicals.

[mibn2cweus]

Not really

There are often many different standards and definitions, even within one organisation (organization).

Where temperature is a factor (usually) that and other contributing variables should always be defined or specified.

absolute hot

below absolute zero

[fredpuli47]

It also depends on what you are used to. An example is in the difference between people in Nice and people in Geneva. In Nice, I notice, people start complaining about how cold it is at 7 Celsius and soon wrap themselves up like Inuit. I've been in Geneva at 1 Celsius and the only people I saw wearing coats were a few women wearing them as fashion! Either its habituation, and 'in the mind', or the Swiss were carrying more fat that the people in Nice (which didn't seem likely)!