how come spilled water inside and outside evaporates so quickly despite water’s evaporation point bring 100°, no where near the ambient temperature in home or outside?

Question

how come spilled water inside and outside evaporates so quickly despite water’s evaporation point bring 100°, no where near the ambient temperature in home or outside?

In: 365

Answer 1

As others have stated, 100C is the boiling point, not evaporation which is a different process.

With boiling, you’re actively turning the water from a liquid to a gas which can then fly away.

With evaporation, you have to zoom in to the atoms to see what’s going on. All atoms have some amount of kinetic energy. Their wizzing around, bumping into other atoms, vibrating, rotating, etc. Sometimes, right at the surface of water, one of these wizzing atoms just sort of **pops** right off the rest of the water and keeps wizzing away. That’s evaporation. It’s when atoms have just enough energy to individually escape the rest of their pack without changing their state of matter.