Comment on 2hot2handle
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 20 hours agoYes, afaik in science community that is in fact the correct use of the word, meaning from “environmental” conditions (well, it’s test conditions for the environment in this case) and not from an active, localised influence.
Dasus@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I mean, if you put some stuff in a room, then slowly start to heat the room up, would you describe the things — which will at one point or another catch fire —as “spontaneously” combusting?
I’m not arguing the use is wrong here, just a thought I had.
SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Yes, actually. The autoignition point is the temperature at which a given material will spontaneously (as in, without a spark or the like) catch fire, given a source of oxygen.
Dasus@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 17 hours ago
Yes, that is why I used the quotation marks & explained that the “head up the room” in your case would be a simulation of environment.
Eg, a tree at 20°C has an extremely low chance of spontaneously combusting into a self-fueling oxidation event (lol) in your average environment, but those chances at 200°C are much higher.
In order to test that spontaneous combustion theory (whilst having no regard for the life of the tree) you would need to simulate that 200°C environment conditions. By heating the air around the tree.
In that case you would heat up a chamber or whatever and in turn eventually maybe burn the tree.
This wound still test/prove the spontaneous combustibility thing.
You bringing open flame in contact with the tree however would not* be that - that is just actively starting a reaction.
*unless the environmental conditions you were testing/simulating was “open 1000° flames completely everywhere” … but you may not get a grant for testing if wood added to fire also burns
rumba@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
“Spontaneous” in this usage is highly dependent on frame of reference.
Dasus@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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