Skip to main content

What's a flame?

I just heard the Science Friday's coverage of Alan Ada's challenge of explaining a flame to an 11 year old. I want to take a gander at this, then I'll look at what the scientist say.

What's a flame?

A flame is energy. What you see is energy being released in the form of light and heat, from likely a chemical reaction. And the distinct tongues in a flame are plasma, a form of super heated air, that throws off energy (light and heat) as it cools down. In space flames are round, but when there is gravity hot air is less dense (or lighter) and gets pushed up by the colder heavier (denser) air thus the flame licks upwards and dances as different air comes in and gets 'burned' and turned into plasma. 

For all the stuff I know: what I just wrote above might actually be wrong. I've never had it explained to me. Now let's see what the scientist say.

Edit: 6-8-2012
So now the Science Friday winner has been determined, or at least a cool video was posted we got to revisit what I wrote and most of it was wrong!

What I got wrong was: there is no plasma. Which I should've know because plasma is super heated hydrogen and normal flames don't have an over abundance of hydrogen. Turns out the red and orange in a flame are little particles of carbon or soot that's cooling down and sending off light as it does. Which makes total sense cause if you pass your finger through a flame it turns black like full of soot. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contrasting Styles of Writing: English vs. Spanish

There is interestingly enough a big difference between what's considered good writing in Spanish and English . V.S. Naipul winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for literature publish an article on writing . In it he emphasizes the use of short clear sentences and encourages the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Essentially he pushes the writer to abandon florid language and master spartan communication . This is a desired feature of English prose , where short clipped sentences are the norm and seamlessly flow into a paragraph. In English prose the paragraph is the unit the writer cares about the most. This is not the case in Spanish where whole short stories (I'm thinking this was Gabriel Garcia Marquez but maybe it was Cortázar) are written in one sentence. Something so difficult to do in English that the expert translator could best manage to encapsulate the tale in two sentences. The florid language is what is considered good writing in Spani...
3 comments
Read more

Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo...
2 comments
Read more

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior t...
1 comment
Read more