We will now enter a new area, heat conduction. This is not really a move away from energy conversion because most of our examples will be based on our home and how to conserve heating and cooling costs using better insulating materials. If you hold one end of a copper rod and place the other end in a flame, the end you are holding gets hotter and hotter, even though it is not in direct contact with the flame.
Heat reaches the cooler end by conduction through the material.
On the atomic level, the atoms in the hotter regions have more kinetic energy, on the average, than their cooler neighbors, and so it goes through the material. The atoms themselves do not move from one region to another but their energy does. In metals, electron motion provides another mechanism for heat transfer. Most metals are good conductors of electricity because some electrons can leave their parent atoms and wander through the crystal lattice. Good thermal conductors such as silver, copper, gold, and aluminum are also good electrical conductors.