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
SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 1 hour 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 20 minutes ago
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