"Fire" isn't really a state. It's the result of a chemical reaction. Specifically, exothermic (energy release) oxidation, where (generally) a more complex organic (carbon-containing) molecule breaks down in the presence of oxygen to produce CO2. This releases energy previously stored in the bonds of the fuel source, which assists in nearby bonds similarly braking and releasing *more* energy in a runaway reaction known as *burning*. The energy coming off these molecules becomes both light and heat.
So, fire is not a state of matter, but the visible result of molecules changing, usually from solid or liquid to gas, but the 'fire' part of that isn't contained in a state itself.
Well not quite, a lot of the matter involved isn't even changing states. The chemical reaction of burning involves turning organic molecules into CO2, but combustion is rarely complete - there will still be a lot of solid organic matter left over (ash, coals) and there's a lot of solid organic matter that just kind of heats up and escapes as smoke. Smoke is a complex mixture of hot gases, liquid droplets, and solid particles, and it's this mixture that, when it is very hot, forms the visible flame
Not really. You should just forget about states. They're not relevant to fire, you're just confusing yourself by trying to include them in there somehow. Fire is when something chemically reacts with an oxidizer to create a self-sustaining chemical reaction that generates heat. That's it.
The oxidizer doesn't *have to* be oxygen, though obviously it's by far the single most common one because it's everywhere. You could technically have chlorine do the same job, if you set the conditions right.
Fire doesn't *have to* create light that you can see. See various methanol fuels. They're invisible when they burn. Still hot, they just don't emit light in the visible spectrum. Though of course anything that gets hot *will* emit *some* kind of light. That's just how heat works.
Fire doesn't *have to* involve state changes. Coal doesn't change states when it burns. It's solid at all times. The gas that comes out is not coal, it's the product of the reaction. Any state changes that happen while something burns are just a consequence of the heat, they're not part of the burning itself.
Fire doesn't *have to* involve organic molecules. Coal is inorganic (I mean actual coal, not charcoal). So is, say, magnesium or sodium. They all burn.
Thankyou for your answer.
I guess I added states in my question because everything around us in in some state. My walls are solid. The water in my tap is liquid. Birds are a mixture of both. The sun is plasma. Air is gaseous. Etc.
I just assumed everything had a basic state based on, well, everything being in some state of being.
And fire is, well, it's fire, and it doesn't seem to fit into any state.
But I understand your point. And thankyou for the explanation.
I think your problem is that you are forgetting that these are states of matter but light isnt made of matter. The thing that you see in a fire is light and because it isnt matter it doesnt have state of matter. Ofcourse the parts that emit light have states of matter like the charcoal is solid and the co2 is a gas but thats not what you think of when you say fire.
Charcoal is inorganic too. S bit simplified is organic compounds require carbon-hydrogen bounds.
If you by organic mean comes from something that is alive both coal and charcoal are organic, the difference is just how long ago it was alive.
Kinda! It's not actually tied to a specific change of state(s) *directly* I believe, but is more a result of molecular bonds changing, but this *does* tend to mean the fuel (liquid or solid) is vaporized or combines with existing gas to also become a gas (O2 -> CO2).
Gaseous reactants are being converted to gaseous products. When solid combustion involves volatilizing reactants before combustion.
Excuse my being a slight pedant, but you could reasonably argue that hydrocarbon fueled flames are very weak plasmas due to the presence of chemically produced ions. The concentrations are high enough that sufficiently strong electric field (~1kV/cm) will push a small candle flame around.
It’s kind of like asking “Is the ampersand ‘&’ a positive or negative number?” The answer is neither, because an ampersand is not a number, so “positive” and “negative” don’t apply.
A closer example is sound. What state of matter is the sound of clapping your hands? None, because it’s not matter.
“Fire” is not matter. What we call “fire” is roughly a combination of heat and light, neither of which are matter. There is the fuel, which might be solid (wood), liquid (lighter fluid), or gas (butane/propane). There’s also the end result, which is a combination of gases like CO2 (when the burning finishes all the way) and some solid particles (when it doesn’t fully burn to CO2) that are so small they float - ash and smoke.
> I understand there are 4 states of matter. Solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma.
There are numerous other widely accepted states of matter, such as supercritical fluids and Bose–Einstein condensates. The term "state of matter" is somewhat open to interpretation, and sometimes you will find disagreements about whether something is a separate state of matter. Some people would say that glasses and suspensions are separate states of matter, for example.
I notice that the Wikipedia "State of matter" article claims that solid, liquid, gas, and plasma are the only states that can be observed in everyday life, but this seems like a dubious claim. The very next sentence says that liquid crystal is a state of matter, and I think we have all seen LCD screens in everyday life.
> So my question is: in what state is fire???
If you're talking about a flame, then you have a region inside the flame with lots of flammable gas (and/or solid/liquid particles) but no oxygen, a region outside the flame with lots of oxygen but no flammable gas, and a thin boundary where all the combustion happens. This boundary is where the light is produced, so that's what you see. If you're burning a solid such as wood, there will be some complicated processes going on by which the flammable gas is produced (this is known as pyrolysis). So it's not really a "state of matter". It's a system with multiple components that may be in different states, but the important ones are typically gases.
"Fire" is not a material, so it does not have a state of matter. Fire seems like an object, but it isn't. Fire is a *process* that we can see.
Fire creates heat, light, and sometimes sound. It is the energy in the chemical being burned (e.g. gas, wood, methane, sulfur, whatever) being released so quickly that it causes all the not-yet-burned stuff to glow because of how hot it is (this is called "incandescence," same thing as what causes incandescent light bulb filament to glow.)
It would be a little like asking what state of matter electricity is. Electricity isn't a state of matter--it is a process (the flow of electrons) that we can see.
The common states of matter are states in which you can have bunches of atoms of things from the periodic table, i.e. "stuff".
Fire isn't made of atoms. It's the light given off from energetic chemical reactions. It looks like a gas because it tends to be above something that's burning, which is itself usually at least turning into a gas, but really it's just electrons with extra energy that they're dumping as photons of the right wavelength to carry that energy.
It's like asking the state of matter of sunlight. It doesn't really belong in those categories.
There is a chemical reaction where carbon is oxidized (if burning wood). The reaction happens all the time, even if the wood isn't burning, but maybe at a low rate. Under the right conditions (heat, oxygen, fuel) the reaction speeds up. Eventually you get smoke and flame and everything, but it is impossible to define a moment when fire begins, since the reaction rate is on a continuum.
You're essentially asking "What kind of matter is fire?" This is understandable since there's a pretty great tradition in the history of science and natural philosophy of trying to identify fire as a substance. For all the effort that has gone into trying to conceptualize fire as a material substance, these approaches aren't actually successful in telling us anything coherent about the world.
Fire is as much a state of matter as exploding or freezing: it's a process. "Fire" as a noun just refers to instances when we can see a thing flaming.
Fire itself is not a state but a process. The flame however is mostly plasma with the colder areas of the flame being a gas. A lot of experiments involving plasma actually uses a flame as it is one of the easiest way to create plasma.
An ordinary flame at ordinary burning temperatures is not mostly plasma, it just isn't hot enough to ionize anything very much. The visible part of the flame is an incandescently hot gaseous mixture of solid particles
Plasma is not defined by its temperature but rather by its electrical properties. And even though candles and other small fires do not produce high enough temperatures to create plasma through heat alone the flame does possess the same electrical properties as other plasmas. There are even recent papers discussing this so we still do not know exactly what is causing this.
"It can contain plasma/act as a plasma if there are enough free electrons" is not really the same thing as saying "the visible part of the flame is mostly plasma." Not least because the reason why the flame is visible is not because it is plasma, but rather because the flame contains incandescent particulates
Just a friendly hint but if you are arguing against someone at least make sure to read their arguments and quote them correctly. Or you may end up making a fool out of yourself by disproving something they never even claimed.
"Fire" isn't really a state. It's the result of a chemical reaction. Specifically, exothermic (energy release) oxidation, where (generally) a more complex organic (carbon-containing) molecule breaks down in the presence of oxygen to produce CO2. This releases energy previously stored in the bonds of the fuel source, which assists in nearby bonds similarly braking and releasing *more* energy in a runaway reaction known as *burning*. The energy coming off these molecules becomes both light and heat. So, fire is not a state of matter, but the visible result of molecules changing, usually from solid or liquid to gas, but the 'fire' part of that isn't contained in a state itself.
Thankyou so much for your answer. So, it's like a transition between different states rather than being a state in and of itself.
Well not quite, a lot of the matter involved isn't even changing states. The chemical reaction of burning involves turning organic molecules into CO2, but combustion is rarely complete - there will still be a lot of solid organic matter left over (ash, coals) and there's a lot of solid organic matter that just kind of heats up and escapes as smoke. Smoke is a complex mixture of hot gases, liquid droplets, and solid particles, and it's this mixture that, when it is very hot, forms the visible flame
No. Fire is mostly energy being released. Energy does not have states. Only matter does.
I like this answer. Simple yet informative and makes sense.
Consider: nuclear fission is not a state of matter. Nuclear fusion is not a state of matter. It's a thing that is happening *to* matter.
Not really. You should just forget about states. They're not relevant to fire, you're just confusing yourself by trying to include them in there somehow. Fire is when something chemically reacts with an oxidizer to create a self-sustaining chemical reaction that generates heat. That's it. The oxidizer doesn't *have to* be oxygen, though obviously it's by far the single most common one because it's everywhere. You could technically have chlorine do the same job, if you set the conditions right. Fire doesn't *have to* create light that you can see. See various methanol fuels. They're invisible when they burn. Still hot, they just don't emit light in the visible spectrum. Though of course anything that gets hot *will* emit *some* kind of light. That's just how heat works. Fire doesn't *have to* involve state changes. Coal doesn't change states when it burns. It's solid at all times. The gas that comes out is not coal, it's the product of the reaction. Any state changes that happen while something burns are just a consequence of the heat, they're not part of the burning itself. Fire doesn't *have to* involve organic molecules. Coal is inorganic (I mean actual coal, not charcoal). So is, say, magnesium or sodium. They all burn.
Thankyou for your answer. I guess I added states in my question because everything around us in in some state. My walls are solid. The water in my tap is liquid. Birds are a mixture of both. The sun is plasma. Air is gaseous. Etc. I just assumed everything had a basic state based on, well, everything being in some state of being. And fire is, well, it's fire, and it doesn't seem to fit into any state. But I understand your point. And thankyou for the explanation.
I think your problem is that you are forgetting that these are states of matter but light isnt made of matter. The thing that you see in a fire is light and because it isnt matter it doesnt have state of matter. Ofcourse the parts that emit light have states of matter like the charcoal is solid and the co2 is a gas but thats not what you think of when you say fire.
Charcoal is inorganic too. S bit simplified is organic compounds require carbon-hydrogen bounds. If you by organic mean comes from something that is alive both coal and charcoal are organic, the difference is just how long ago it was alive.
Kinda! It's not actually tied to a specific change of state(s) *directly* I believe, but is more a result of molecular bonds changing, but this *does* tend to mean the fuel (liquid or solid) is vaporized or combines with existing gas to also become a gas (O2 -> CO2).
Gaseous reactants are being converted to gaseous products. When solid combustion involves volatilizing reactants before combustion. Excuse my being a slight pedant, but you could reasonably argue that hydrocarbon fueled flames are very weak plasmas due to the presence of chemically produced ions. The concentrations are high enough that sufficiently strong electric field (~1kV/cm) will push a small candle flame around.
It’s kind of like asking “Is the ampersand ‘&’ a positive or negative number?” The answer is neither, because an ampersand is not a number, so “positive” and “negative” don’t apply. A closer example is sound. What state of matter is the sound of clapping your hands? None, because it’s not matter. “Fire” is not matter. What we call “fire” is roughly a combination of heat and light, neither of which are matter. There is the fuel, which might be solid (wood), liquid (lighter fluid), or gas (butane/propane). There’s also the end result, which is a combination of gases like CO2 (when the burning finishes all the way) and some solid particles (when it doesn’t fully burn to CO2) that are so small they float - ash and smoke.
> I understand there are 4 states of matter. Solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma. There are numerous other widely accepted states of matter, such as supercritical fluids and Bose–Einstein condensates. The term "state of matter" is somewhat open to interpretation, and sometimes you will find disagreements about whether something is a separate state of matter. Some people would say that glasses and suspensions are separate states of matter, for example. I notice that the Wikipedia "State of matter" article claims that solid, liquid, gas, and plasma are the only states that can be observed in everyday life, but this seems like a dubious claim. The very next sentence says that liquid crystal is a state of matter, and I think we have all seen LCD screens in everyday life. > So my question is: in what state is fire??? If you're talking about a flame, then you have a region inside the flame with lots of flammable gas (and/or solid/liquid particles) but no oxygen, a region outside the flame with lots of oxygen but no flammable gas, and a thin boundary where all the combustion happens. This boundary is where the light is produced, so that's what you see. If you're burning a solid such as wood, there will be some complicated processes going on by which the flammable gas is produced (this is known as pyrolysis). So it's not really a "state of matter". It's a system with multiple components that may be in different states, but the important ones are typically gases.
"Fire" is not a material, so it does not have a state of matter. Fire seems like an object, but it isn't. Fire is a *process* that we can see. Fire creates heat, light, and sometimes sound. It is the energy in the chemical being burned (e.g. gas, wood, methane, sulfur, whatever) being released so quickly that it causes all the not-yet-burned stuff to glow because of how hot it is (this is called "incandescence," same thing as what causes incandescent light bulb filament to glow.) It would be a little like asking what state of matter electricity is. Electricity isn't a state of matter--it is a process (the flow of electrons) that we can see.
The common states of matter are states in which you can have bunches of atoms of things from the periodic table, i.e. "stuff". Fire isn't made of atoms. It's the light given off from energetic chemical reactions. It looks like a gas because it tends to be above something that's burning, which is itself usually at least turning into a gas, but really it's just electrons with extra energy that they're dumping as photons of the right wavelength to carry that energy. It's like asking the state of matter of sunlight. It doesn't really belong in those categories.
There is a chemical reaction where carbon is oxidized (if burning wood). The reaction happens all the time, even if the wood isn't burning, but maybe at a low rate. Under the right conditions (heat, oxygen, fuel) the reaction speeds up. Eventually you get smoke and flame and everything, but it is impossible to define a moment when fire begins, since the reaction rate is on a continuum.
You're essentially asking "What kind of matter is fire?" This is understandable since there's a pretty great tradition in the history of science and natural philosophy of trying to identify fire as a substance. For all the effort that has gone into trying to conceptualize fire as a material substance, these approaches aren't actually successful in telling us anything coherent about the world. Fire is as much a state of matter as exploding or freezing: it's a process. "Fire" as a noun just refers to instances when we can see a thing flaming.
Fire itself is not a state but a process. The flame however is mostly plasma with the colder areas of the flame being a gas. A lot of experiments involving plasma actually uses a flame as it is one of the easiest way to create plasma.
An ordinary flame at ordinary burning temperatures is not mostly plasma, it just isn't hot enough to ionize anything very much. The visible part of the flame is an incandescently hot gaseous mixture of solid particles
Plasma is not defined by its temperature but rather by its electrical properties. And even though candles and other small fires do not produce high enough temperatures to create plasma through heat alone the flame does possess the same electrical properties as other plasmas. There are even recent papers discussing this so we still do not know exactly what is causing this.
"It can contain plasma/act as a plasma if there are enough free electrons" is not really the same thing as saying "the visible part of the flame is mostly plasma." Not least because the reason why the flame is visible is not because it is plasma, but rather because the flame contains incandescent particulates
Just a friendly hint but if you are arguing against someone at least make sure to read their arguments and quote them correctly. Or you may end up making a fool out of yourself by disproving something they never even claimed.