this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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You can melt anything. An egg will burn first. Then you will get some type of rendered carbon ash. Which will, eventually, melt and/or vaporize with enough heat.
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.