What’s the difference between water boiling and it evaporating normally? Don’t both end up the same, ie. water turning into gas form?
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They’re more or less the same thing.
Temperature is an average. Even though what I’m about to say is technically wrong, it’s accurate enough for the purposes of this question: for a cup of water at 30C, if you zoom in to the molecular level, you could observe bits that are 20C, 50C, 10C, and once in a while some that hit 100C and boil off just as if the whole cup of water were at 100C.
For completeness: The technically incorrect bit is that, again, temperature is an average. More specifically, it measures average kinetic energy. Molecules are constantly moving. Solids are made of molecules linked to each other wiggling about. Liquids are made of molecules sticking together but sliding around. Gases are molecules that fly around freely. And the act of boiling or evaporation is water molecules that happen to slide around fast enough to escape the sticky liquid bit and fly free as gas. Water molecules are much more likely to do this at 100C than 30C, so it happens fast enough to look like bubbling and steam. At 30C you still get individual water molecules escaping into gas speed, but since most of the water molecules are moving slower as they slide around, it happens too slow for you to really notice with your naked eye (unless you wait a while).
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