like10thousand's Profile

So granite has a low *specific heat,* which is the amount of temperature it can absorb or needs to have taken away before it actually changes temperature, meaning you can put something really cold or hot on it and it still won't change temperature as much. Or, it absorbs all the coldness from your frozen chicken without getting colder, so it can continue to warm the chicken up. It's a bad energy conductor, but it's a good energy absorber.

If you want to get technical, and I remember this from freshman year Physical World well enough, the bonds between the granite molecules are very strong so each molecule is very stable. You have to put a LOT of heat in, or cold, to make the molecules shake faster (warm up) or slow down (get cold). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity