What State of Matter is Fire

good morning john i've been a person who professionally talks about science for years now it's a wonderful job and i love almost every question i get there are two kinds of questions that i don't love to get one is one that i've answered a bunch of times before and i'm like all right somebody else handle this one second is questions that seem like they should just be very easy to answer but they aren't and they're just they sit there and i don't answer them and i'm like why is this so hard and no question in this second category is more common than the title of this video what state of matter is fire if you ask this question to google you get all wrong answers why are we doing this to ourselves what is so hard here well we are doing this to ourselves because it is very very very not simple now matter really does mostly exist in a few discrete states and that's literally because of how the atoms and molecules are interacting with each other but i think what mostly sticks with us uh isn't like thinking about in terms of particles it's just sort of the the qualities so a solid keeps its shape a liquid keeps its volume but its shape can change and then a gas its volume and shape can change and if you just take that and you put it on fire you're like well none of that's true so let me instead answer this question with a question what state of matter is a waterfall now you're going to think to yourself hank that's a liquid but no the water in the water follows a liquid but the waterfall is not matter it is a process caused by a bunch of liquid and gas and solids in a specific situation a waterfall does not have a state of matter because a waterfall isn't matter it's a process now you can look at it and you can say that cliff is made of rock and the water is a liquid and the air that's sort of tossing up those beautiful water droplets that's a gas so i can kind of answer the question what state of matter is a waterfall it's a bunch of different states of matter and so the natural thing to do is to do this with fire just label the constituents and this is why fire is harder than a waterfall because the molecules in a fire unlike the molecules in a waterfall are undergoing rapid chemical reactions and while those chemicals are still made of matter they are reacting they do not have a state of matter because their electrons are jumping from atom to atom molecules are rearranging and in the space between one chemical and another we don't really know what things are because we can't put them in bottles we can however stop them i'm gonna do that for you right now i'm gonna i'm gonna pause the chemical reaction while it is going off if i pass my spoon through my fire what i get is soot and this is why a lot of people say that the state of matter of fire is a solid what is happening in this fire is that wax is evaporating and then it is combusting it's burning in the process of that combustion lots of different weird chemicals are formed and they are all turned into these little tiny particles that in the flame while they are undergoing chemical reactions glow with their own heat as they continue through the flame they continue to react and at the end of this process you don't have that solid anymore but in there most of what you see as the fire is solid pieces of soot glowing but there's also a component of the flame the blue part to be exact that is not caused by soot particles glowing this is excited atoms of gas emitting light as well but also because there's so many reactions happening so quickly in combustion a lot of the matter in a flame isn't behaving like how we think matter behaves because it's in the midst of a chemical reaction so those atoms and electrons and ions and molecules and in-betweeny molecules they kind of aren't any state of matter and maybe we will understand all of that better someday but really it's just a place where these usually quite hard lines between things kind of breaks down for me though there's a real answer here that's all much simpler than this fire does not have a state of matter because fire is not matter fire is a process john i'll see you on wednesday to wednesday tuesday by the way this used project for awesome calendar is now available we do it a little before the project for awesome so you can actually have it this year's calendar celebrates a lot of the history of nerdfighteria with different images from kind of different eras of this wonderful bizarre thing that also is very difficult to describe

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 451,698

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Id: dn5a0pQmJwE

Length: 4min 0sec (240 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021