23 JUN 2013 by ideonexus

 An Elegant Complex Description of Fire

The atoms like each other to different degrees. Oxygen, for instance in the air, would like to be next to carbon, and if they get near to each other, they snap together. If they’re not too close though, they repel and they go apart, so they don’t know that they could snap together. It’s just as if you had a ball, it was trying to climb a hill and there was a hole it could go into, like a volcano hole, a deep one. It’s rolling along, it doesn’t go down in the deep hole, because if it...
Folksonomies: nature wonder explanations
Folksonomies: nature wonder explanations
  1  notes

From Richard Feynman, making the process of burning wood seem wondrous.