![larger than light steam larger than light steam](http://www.quickmeme.com/img/53/53efcd3bdb2d91ccb8ed853b24f79fb2b3bf552fe678d5745d3d50c027b76f04.jpg)
The latter is what you can actually see pure gaseous water is transparent.Ĭonversely, if you can see it, it’s not pure gaseous water, and I would be impressed if you actually managed to temperature-sense that with your skin. The steam that forms above pots or kettles with boiling water and anything else that is colloquially called steam is a mixture of gaseous water, air, and liquid water droplets. I am not sure what your steam experience is, but immersing any part of the body in pure 100 ☌ gaseous water is pretty difficult (and dangerous). What your temperature sensors perceive mostly depends of the amount of water. On top, you may have an additional protective layer of saliva or similar that needs to heat up before anything important does (pointed out by Shmuel Newmark).
#Larger than light steam skin
Sipping brings a very small amount of water in contact with your skin that gets cooled down through contact with skin and air rapidly (on account of being so small). It then cooled down during brewing the tea, pouring and through contact with the cup.
![larger than light steam larger than light steam](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/25/3d/e5/253de595a68d2eeef45455ee9c1ecf16.jpg)
Sipping a cup of hot tea doesn’t give you 100 ☌ water.Įven if you brewed the tea with boiled water, the latter probably wasn’t homogeneously 100 ☌ to begin with. (Note that by feel, I refer to your direct sense of temperature and not to the effects of the resulting injuries and similar.)įor example, this Healthline article reports 1 s of exposure to 69 ☌ water to be sufficient for a third-degree burn, which destroys your nerve endings and thus is mostly painless on the long run (and I doubt anybody can distinguish the nuances of extreme pain occurring before). In this case, I have several reasons to distrust your reports about what temperature you feel. I am not exactly sure what you are comparing here, but if you take a sufficiently large piece of your skin and expose it to 100 ☌ water (in either phase) for a sufficiently long time for your temperature sensors to actually give a reasonable result, you would suffer from a severe burn. Hot water and steam are both dangerous but fundamentally different, so comparing them is like gorilla vs. TL DR: You have probably not been exposed to 100☌ water in either phase and even if you had, you could not have reasonably felt its temperature on account of receiving a third-degree burn. Here is a link to a related school material. But now that it has, let me mention that this is a common secondary textbook fact, that is taught and studied in India. I expected no confusion regarding such steam causing more severe effects. So, it has more energy but same temperature.
#Larger than light steam plus
These vaporised molecules, possessing same energy of water (is at same temperature as it) plus latent heat of vaporisation, is what I am referring to as steam. Boiling starts when it reaches 100 degree Celsius and bulk vaporization takes place. To resolve the confusions: When we heat water, its temperature keep on increasing. I conclude from this that total energy doesn't matter when it comes to what feels hotter.īut it is said that steam at 100 ☌ feels hotter than water at 100 ☌ because steam has more energy, which is contradictory to my conclusion. A block of ice as big as a room will have more thermal energy than a cup of hot tea.īut the tea feels hotter because the average kinetic energy (temperature) is higher in case of tea.