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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One way you can visualize water involves thinking about its molecules like a big ball pit. For the most part those molecules are inclined to stick to each other. But if some effort is made, balls can leave the pit and end up stuck to air molecules instead.
Evaporation is a really slow process where two things do the “work”. One is a temperature differential: if the air is warmer than the water, heat “wants” to move between the two and the movement of that heat constitutes energy transfer. That extra heat hitting the water can do the work of “knocking loose” a molecule. (The visualization is more like air molecules are bouncing around and hit the water molecules.) The secondary factor is warmer air has more “space” for water molecules to fit in (due to its molecules moving faster and being less dense) so the natural tendency of diffusion means the water molecules are sort of “pulled” into the air more easily. Colder air and colder water means slower evaporation, because there’s less energy being transferred and it takes energy for evaporation to occur.
Boiling is a much more violent process because it involves adding a ton of extra heat to the water. Once there is enough heat, the water molecules are bouncing around so fast they break their own bonds. That *forces* water molecules into the air, and part of why we see steam is there is temporarily so much water escaping the “ball pit” there’s not enough space for the air to accept it all. This is a fast process because energy is being delivered to the water very quickly.
So the same things are happening in boiling and evaporation, the main difference is whether the energy transfer that breaks molecular bonds is happening fast or slow.
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