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

No. The temperature of an object is determined by the *average* kinetic energy of its particles within the object’s rest frame. Your ‘checkerboard’ object would have a temperature halfway between that of the fast atoms and the slow atoms, and the ‘checkerboard’ itself would only last a fraction of a second before the atoms’ velocities became randomized again through transfer of energy.

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