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