Comment on If someone was shrunk down to the size of an ant would they be able to make a little ant sized campfire with the same principles? Does it scale like that?

<- View Parent
SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

I’ve never seen such a small flame, I think they can’t exist. Why? I don’t know.

Your intuition is correct and it’s quite simple really. A small fire cools down faster than it can keep/generate its own heat.

Surface area of the fire (which correlates with how quickly it cools) grows with the square of the size of the fire. Meanwhile volume of the fire (which correlates to how much heat it generates, how much fuel it is burning) grows with the cube.

At small sizes, the surface area can win out against the volume. However, because it grows with the cube, the volume eventually wins as the fire gets bigger. So a fire can only get so small.

source
Sort:hotnewtop