Since no one took you up on your question, I’ll take it up.
Temperature gives us a gear for talking about how hot or cold something is by degrees. The more degrees something has the hotter we say it is, the less the colder down to the limit of absolute zero.
Yet temperature is actually one number over a lot of complex interactions and exchanges of energy between particles (for now bottoming out at that particular gear). If we look at those individual particles we’ll find a more complex story that’s noisy (and gets noisier as things get hotter), but that’s not actually necessary to know about to answer questions like “will this thing melt?” or “will this thing freeze?”, which generally just require knowing the average energy of the thing to predict how it will behave.
Since no one took you up on your question, I’ll take it up.
Temperature gives us a gear for talking about how hot or cold something is by degrees. The more degrees something has the hotter we say it is, the less the colder down to the limit of absolute zero.
Yet temperature is actually one number over a lot of complex interactions and exchanges of energy between particles (for now bottoming out at that particular gear). If we look at those individual particles we’ll find a more complex story that’s noisy (and gets noisier as things get hotter), but that’s not actually necessary to know about to answer questions like “will this thing melt?” or “will this thing freeze?”, which generally just require knowing the average energy of the thing to predict how it will behave.
Solid answer.