At the atomic level, is heat conduction simply radiation? Radiation and conduction are two ways that heat is transferred. Convection isn't really a mode of transfer as the actual heat transfer really occurs through radiation/conduction and not by some other process.
What I was wondering was if this were more general; that at the atomic level, radiation is the only mode of heat transfer. So during heat conduction, do the atoms transfer heat by applying forces on each other or do they emit radiation which gets absorbed by the neighbouring atoms or is it some other way?
Thank you.
 A: No, conduction and radiation are two different ways how to transfer heat. During radiation, an atom emits energy in form of a photon that gets absorbed by another atom and heats it up. But during conduction, the atoms exchange energy in collisions. So conduction and radiation are two completely different mechanisms.
A: I don't think this is a stupid question at all. Ultimately we don't know the answer.  We have a conventional understanding of gravity but no one really knows what it is.  No one really knows what electromagnetism is either, so we call both of them a "force" and pretend we've figured it all out and there is nothing left to learn.  Sure we know how these forces manifest in reality and we can build things using this knowledge, but we should always question conventional understandings and real scientists do this.  One can understand that "collisions" occur that transfer heat and this helps in building an oven but not in satisfying one's curiosity of what is fundamentally happening.  The question asks at the atomic level, someone tell me, what is an atom and how can two of them really "touch" one another? 
A: In QED or quantum field theory, yes, radiation, conduction and convection would all be the same thing; just an interaction with the electromagnetic field and the electron or proton (quark) field. In otherwords, yes, all "heat transfer" is an electromagnetic field disturbance. 
But in the practical world, such as cooking we see a meaningful difference between the types of heating because there are more moving charges and molecules at play. Cooking over a flame has a major convection component because of the water vapor content in the flame. A flame cooks differently than say an infrared grill, even if the grill itself may have the exact same temperature.
