Is fire <span title="matter?ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt">matter?tttttttttttttttttt...</span>

Question

Is fire matter?tttttttttttttttttt...

Answer 1

Fire is not matter. It is the heat and light energy given off by the rapid oxidation of a fuel. It is a tangible side effect of matter changing form in a chemical reaction.

BTW, fire is not plasma, which is another state of matter. Simple combustion (fire) is not hot enough to create plasma, an ionized gas, in which a proportion of electrons are free.

Fire also has nothing to do with E = mc². No fire can get hot enough to break the strong nuclear force that binds the nucleus of an atom.

Edit: I understand Fred&#039;s POV. If one were to ask 1000 chemists, and 1000 physicists, there would be a heck of a debate. Just Google &quot;What is fire?&quot; and you&#039;ll get answers on both sides.

http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/...

&quot;Watching a flame dance through the air, you might conclude that fire&#039;s a gas, like oxygen or carbon dioxide. It&#039;s not. Fire can burn fuel that&#039;s a gas, or a liquid, or even a solid--as in the case of glowing charcoal. But the fire itself isn&#039;t any of these things. In fact, fire isn&#039;t any thing at all. It&#039;s not its own type of matter; it&#039;s something that matter can do. Fire is a chemical reaction. &quot;

http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/as...

&quot;So fire is a process, a chemical reaction, between atoms. These atoms have a mass, but they would be there and have the same mass even if a fire wasn’t burning. Hence the fire itself, being a process rather than an object as the alchemists thought, does not have mass.&quot;

http://science.howstuffworks.com/fire1.h...

&quot;Fire isn&#039;t matter at all. It&#039;s a visible, tangible side effect of matter changing form -- it&#039;s one part of a chemical reaction. &quot;

No offense Fred. As Paul Dirac said,

&quot;The problem of the exact description of vacuum, in my opinion, is the basic problem now before physics. Really, if you can’t correctly describe the vacuum, how it is possible to expect a correct description of something more complex?&quot;

Answer 2

Fire is a chemical reaction, the product of fire is matter though.

Answer 3

Let&#039;s look at a definition of &quot;Matter&quot;.  If you will agree with me that matter is anything that takes up space and has mass, then a fire (which is a bunch of different gases and some particulates (sometimes, like soot and partially oxidized products)) is indeed matter.  The light that you see, that is the flame is not matter.  It is photonic energy from electrons as they &quot;collapse&quot; to their ground state from whatever orbital they achieved when energized by the heat of the reaction.

-Fred

EDIT: I understand why &quot;Over&quot; says it is not matter, but I believe that he is talking about the light energy part of the fire.  The light, though, is not the onlt thing one sees when looking at fire.  He is correct that fire is certainly NOT, never was, and will never be plasma (except, perhaps in nuclear reactions such as fussion).

Nice question for &quot;debate&quot;.  But again, once you define &quot;matter&quot;, you have the answer.

Answer 4

Ya

Fire is the combustion of hydrocarbons contained in whatever you are burning. When a hydrocarbon molecule (like that within wood) is subjected to enough heat its bonds break and energy is released. If you have every taken a Chemistry class you should know that hydrocarbons contain hydrogen and carbon. When the bonds are broken the hydrogen atoms combine with oxygen and form water vapor (which is why fire requires oxygen) leaving carbon behind (the back stuff ash left behind and covering the walls of your fireplace).

When burning a log in a camp fire you light the tinder on fire this heats up the wood enough to cause enough of the wood&#039;s hydrocarbons to combust to keep the reaction going. Heat rises because hotter objects are less dense than cooler ones so some of the hydrocarbons that are heated enough float up. The glow you see in the air that we call fire are those floating hydrocarbons com busting in midair. All components of the reaction besides the photons (light) produced like the hydrocarbons, oxygen, water vapor, and carbon are all matter therefore fire is matter.

Answer 5

Fire is a form of energy, and given mass-energy equivalence (via e=mc^2) it is matter.

Answer 6

Fire is matter in a plasma state.

Answer 7

i think it is matter in a state of change