Temperature and Heat

A sparkler burns at around 1,000 °C, hot enough to glow white. Yet you can hold one safely while the sparks rain onto your hand. A pot of soup is barely 90 °C — but spill it on yourself and you'll get a serious burn.

How can the cooler soup hurt more than the blazing sparkler? Because temperature and heat are two different things, and confusing them is one of the oldest mistakes in physics.