eli5 can something be hot and cold at the same time?

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I know cold and heat contradict themselves, but really it’s just a matter of how fast each atom is moving to find the heat. So if there is a checker pattern of low energy and high energy atoms, could something be both hot and cold? And if so, are there any real world examples of that?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The “checker for high and low energy atoms ” is Maxwell’s Demon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon and is one of the core thought experiments for physics. (Edit I misread checker as a verb….but the point stands)

Within an object all at one temperature, there will be atoms of many energies, but temperature is a function of the collection.

If we think about one object having multiple temperatures, like me having cold hands but normal body temperature, we are implicitly splitting the atoms into two collections.

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