If temperatures are averages, how come we don’t get burned by the hotter particles (in a drink for example) ?
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A burn happens when your molecules are shaken up too much by heat. This doesn’t happen all at once. There are faster and slower molecules in you, too.
Even when you’re being burned, most of the molecules are not being shaken apart. Just a few at a time. The highest-energy ones.
If something’s not hot enough to char, then even it’s higher-energy particles aren’t fast enough to break apart.
You sort of do. That’s why 120-degree water will burn given a little time, but 150-degree water will burn almost instantly: the 150-degree water contains many particles that are high-energy enough to damage your cells, while the 120-degree water contains only a few.
But the distribution falls off pretty fast on the upper end, so the number of particles with very high energy relative to the average is pretty low.
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