system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If there was an area of absolutely no particles whatsoever, what would the temperature be?

I understand that heat comes from particles moving faster and running into each other the hotter it becomes, but what if there were no particles in the area to move? Would it just be absolute zero?
gpt
"Temperature" is actually a statistical value. It describes the average energy of particles in a given system.

If you had no particles, you could not attribute a temperature to the system, because that is an inherent property of the particles, not the system per se.

There are certain cases where even with particles present, it is not possible to describe them with a temperature. One of these examples is the very short timespan after shooting a semiconductor material with a laser beam. The electrons absorb energy from the photons and for a very short time, they are not in equilibrium with each other, meaning the distribution of energy among them is purely random. After a while (we're talking femtoseconds here!) they bump into each other repeatedly, averaging out their kinetic energies, and you can describe them with a single temperature via a Boltzmann distribution.

So, in conclusion, a temperature is a property not every system just *has*, it is a special, although common case where everything is in a dynamic equilibrium and can be described statistically.