Ask-a-Physicist

A friend of mine claims to notice that when he takes a hot frying pan (with a warm, insulating handle), and pours cold water into it, the handle seems to get hotter. He thinks it is because the handle is less insulating than the air, thus the path of least resistance is through the handle.

This would make sense to me when you take the pan off of the heat, but he claims that it isn't until the water hits it that the handle gets significantly hotter. If this is true, what does the water have to do with it? If anything, wouldn't the water become the path of least resistance, and heat would move from the metal to the water, and from the handle to the air?

In figure skating, if you are doing a spin on ice and you leave your arms spread out it creates resistance. If you pull the arms in toward the body, you create less resistance so you spin more easily. How do I express this with mathematical equations in physics?

Does Einstein's relativity of simultaneity mean that two events cannot be simultaneous or that we cannot prove that two events occurred simultaneously?

If somehow there was a tunnel straight through the center of the earth and we dropped a capsule through it, what will happen to the capsule? Would the tunnel shoot the capsule into space?