Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Um, um, um, um, um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Wegel. Um.
Hey, everybody. Okay, so I'm camping right now in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. We're on Leech Lake, and it's been a pretty harrowing trip so far. We canoed in, portaged with all of our heavy gear and canoes, and last night it was so windy that we had to put rocks on our stuff or it would blow all over the place.
So now that we've made it to morning and everyone's still asleep, I thought I would get breakfast going. I really, really need coffee first, though. But to make coffee, you need to boil water. And to boil water, you need to make a fire. Guess what? I'm not the best camper in the world, okay? I'm more of an indoor person. Like, if you need help navigating your Apple TV, I can definitely help you with that.
See, every time I've gone camping, someone else has made the fire. I don't know if they had a lighter or one of those small metal fire starters or a torch, or maybe they lit it with mind control. I don't know. Okay, so you know what, though? Something I've seen on TV my whole life is people rubbing two sticks together, like, really, really, really fast, and that seems to work. Here, let's see if I can do this. Gasp! It's not working! I need coffee! Hey!
My name is Akhil. I am from Georgia and my question is, how do wood sticks make fire? For two wood sticks to make fire, they have to get hot enough to create gases that can catch on fire. Hi, my name is Vy Rath and I study fires.
To get from rubbing two sticks together to a flame, what happens is as you rub the sticks together, because of friction, everything seems to get hot. It's like rubbing your hands together really fast, right? To get your hands warm, it creates that heat. And as you keep generating more and more heat, it starts to break apart the bonds or the molecules inside the wood so that they start to, what we say, evaporate or vaporize.
And that's what creates the fuel for the fire. You kind of have to go through this process of taking a wood stick
Getting it hot enough that you can break apart the molecules inside of it so it can create hot gases and keeping it hot enough that those gases also catch on fire. So that's why when you look at like a match or even just a stick of wood burning, you can kind of see that the stick really isn't on fire, that the flame is actually slightly above the wood stick. You know, it hasn't quite warmed up yet, so I'm going to try that thing of rubbing my hands together to make heat.
Ooh, it's working. You should try it too. Rub your palms together vigorously. Go ahead. What's happening here is as you're scraping the surface of your skin back and forth, it's causing the molecules in your skin to move a little faster. The faster those molecules move, the higher the temperature. So the friction of rubbing your hands together makes them feel warmer. Cool trick, huh? Oh my gosh, it's a moose. I have to go wake everyone else up to see. Talk to you later.
If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to learn more about fire, check out the Brains On podcast where we have a whole episode all about what causes wildfires. If you have a moment of um question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact.
Moment of Bum is produced by Molly Bloom, Rosie DuPont, Anna Goldfield, Ruby Guthrie, Mark Sanchez, Sandin Totten, and Anna Wagle. We had engineering help from Alex Simpson. Our theme song is by Mark Sanchez. Our executive producer is Beth Perlman. The executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kabaddi, Alex Schaffer, and Joanne Griffith. Special thanks this week goes to Lauren Sandler, Courtney Jordan-Beckler, Frank Bates, Beverly Goldfield, and V. Rapp.
See you next time and the next day and the next day and every weekday. Until then.