this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
479 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
57453 readers
4884 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, for eggs, that are carbon based, you will in fact have problems since carbon doesn't have a liquid state at regular atmospheric pressure. I guess you can add pressure, but is that really what we mean when asking a question if something melt?
If I simply ask "can eggs melt" and the answer is complicated but still yes, I would hope it to explain the complications and not just say yes. But I mean, if I just wanted a yes or no answer, and it's technically correct, I'm cool with that. I could always follow up with "how" if the simple answer doesn't satisfy me.
Well, I agree. But what I mean is that when people ask physics questions, it is often implicitly understood to mean under current conditions. You rarely hear normal people or kids (who I find asks most of the physics question) include anything about frictionless vacuums in the question. (For reference: https://xkcd.com/669/ ). So, for the egg question, regular people would most likely consider the answer to be "No, except under very special circumstances". But, I agree with you that if a simple Yes/No answer is expected, it have to be Yes.
Wouldn't that be true for everything then? 3,400C is pretty special circumstances in my book, yet we say tungsten melts.
I don't think adding heat is a special circumstance like adding pressure is. It's very easy to add heat to something. Adding pressure means building a sealed environment to enclose it's, and some specialized equipment to increase the pressure.
Adding heat requires that you burn something. That's it.
Yes, you have a point. However adding heat is often implicit when talking about melting stuff. However, if it requires 3400C, then the answer would probably include a comment about that.