Hey everyone!
My first post here and I’m happy to be a part of this amazing forum.
Seeing as how my search results yielded no information, I figured I had done my due diligence in order to make a new thread.
I was in my advanced Physics lecture yesterday and we were discussing the melting points of items and the teacher went on to say that everything has a melting point. I asked if wood was part of that category as well. And he could not answer me (haha).
Anyone have some information on this?
Every element, perhaps?
It burns before it gets to its melting point.
Now that the GQ has been addressed, I’ll mention I know a woman who is sooooo ugly. . .
[everyone]How ugly is she…?
She could melt wood!
(boo. . .hiss)
Even in a vacuum, wood won’t melt. It will decompose first.
No, everything does not have a melting point.
your instructor is incorrect. Some things will decompose into various constituents, and those constituents might have a melting point.
In addition to wood, there may be various complex items made up of many different things, like cotton or other biological materials.
I think of glass too; it doesn’t have a melting ‘point’ that is easily demarcated
not necessarily a vacuum, but any non-oxidizing atmosphere. This was an experiment in my ninth-grade science class, the destructive distillation of wood. We packed a test tube with wood splints, and stoppered it with a glass tube leading through the stopper and then passing through a cooling bath. A burner under the test tube cooked the wood; the tiny bit of oxygen in there was soon consumed and replaced with CO2 and other wood combustion products, and then - with no more oxygen available - the wood began decomposing into some interesting chemicals that distilled out as combustible liquids and gases after passing through the cooling bath.
But it never did recondense as wood. We definitely were not melting or vaporizing wood.
El_Kabong has it: every element has a melting point, but not every compound does.
I believe that glass is considered to be in a liquid state at room temperature even though it appears solid, it just flows downward very slowly.
QI klaxon goes off
If by very slowly you mean would take several times the age of the universe in order to noticeably deform, yes.
Glass is an amorphous solid, not a liquid. It does flow, but at an incredibly slow rate.
Glass has been found in the tombs of egyptian pharaohs. Surely, if glass flows fast enough to thicken the bottom edge of a window pane in a colonial farmhouse, the glass in the tombs should be a puddle on the floor. Yet, no one has ever seen that happen.
(also, why is there no american show like QI, huh? Thank god someone’s put loads of episodes up on youtube.)
Are there any panel shows in the US?
I wouldn’t have thought it was the kind of show that would be ideal as an introduction to the format.
No, there aren’t and it’s a shame. I really enjoy stuff like WILTY, 8 Out of 10 Cats and QI.
I wonder why, panel shows are really cheap to produce (hence I think one of the reasons there are so many here). I think John Hodgeman could be a decent host for QI USA.
Maybe you should write to BBC America and ask for a US version of QI.They are making a lot more shows for US audiences these days and a cheap panel show would probably go down quite well with their accountants.
I dunno. I’d say 45% of the fun is watching David Mitchell get upset and rant for 3 minutes.
He wood not answer you. Do farts have a melting point?
Then you might enjoy his Soapbox.