Fire is hot

By Kevin Reed

There’s a lot of disagreement these days on all sorts of things. Ideas get political quickly, and people can “believe” some pretty wild stuff. Some may be justified, others not. Lots of it is just opinion over something that is clearly a known fact. But you can ascertain what a fact is on your own, without anyone telling you.

Everything can be boiled down to something. There is a reality all around us, only x amount of which we, as humans, have managed to uncover or understand so far.

There have to be some things we an all agree on, no matter what (barring insanity or insincerity). What are some of those core realities that are universally agreed upon?

I’m sure there are lots of them, but here’s a good one: “Fire is hot.”

Fire is hot in the USA, in Russia, in Japan, in Tanzania, Australia, Antarctica. It behaves exactly the same anywhere on the same principles. Wood will burn the same in all locations on Earth, assuming the same variables (same wood, moisture content, temperatures, atmospheric makeup, wind, etc.). You can independently verify this by simply making a bonfire, or lighting a candle, burning paper, or observing forest fires as you travel around the globe. Or do some international experiments on Zoom where people burn stuff and report back to your group. Your results will match and be independently verifiable, and if not you’d be able to track down the missing variable that changed and independently confirm that variable.

Therefore, we can all universally agree that fire is hot. There are no politics in that. No biases. No belief systems. There’s definitely no opinion about it. Excluding things like cool flames or cold space fires - just talking about average everyday fire - any opinion around whether fire is hot or not is meaningless drivel.

You can see this on your own without any authority saying so. You might feel it if you burn yourself while making a fire. You may be sitting at a campfire and see an insect burn that was on a log you just put on the fire. You may toss your beer can into the fire to watch it melt. You can hear the fire crackle. You can smell the smoke from the fire. Through these things you can conclude that the fire is hot using just your own senses and observations.

Someone might stand up and say “YOU say fire is hot, but I don’t believe it!” At which point you could calmly walk them over to a bonfire and instruct them to insert their arm into the flames. They could say “No I won’t do that, but I still say it’s not hot,” which would make them insincere at best, but would also not disprove that fire is hot.

That person would most certainly not put their arm into the fames and continue to maintain that fire is not hot as their skin flays and peels from their charred bones and they’re either carted off to emergency medical care or left to suffer on their own. I mean, they could burn their arm to cinders and still say that fire is not hot, but then they’d be in the “insane” category, and everyone else watching this spectacle could clearly confirm that fire is, indeed, very hot. That’s where the rubber meets the road, as they say, or where the hard solid wall of reality holds fast against bluster and opinion.

“Fire is hot” is a bit simplistic, but it’s a simple truth. It can be used as a foundation of truth in life, perception, approach, invention, and problem solving. And it’s a simple truth that has led to major human advancement and understanding.

Fire is a known chemical reaction around which there is little to no debate. From this common understanding point you - me - (not to quote Nicole Kidman) all of us - can start to build out foundational knowledge into the basic concepts of engineering, medicine, science, and whatever else.

From this foundational point we build things out into applications like cooking, metal smelting, sterilization, gunpowder, or the internal combustion engine, all of which are rooted in this foundational concept. There’s not a lot of debate around any of these concepts except on the edges of the envelope in various new applications.

But we do have lots of debates around the applications of these proven concepts. Gas stoves vs electric stoves. Is recycling good or not. What are the best ways to cope with disease. What are the best ways to manage guns. Debates between gas cars or electric cars, and is climate change a real thing or not. The answers to these problems exist, but they’re not always known yet by humans.

The answers to these problems will come from the same approach that led us to fire, cooking, metal production, medicine, ballistics and automotive technology. They will come from science.

Because I can stand here and say “An internal combustion engine doesn’t work,” and everyone will know I’m a nut, because they quite obviously do work. We know they work because we see and use them everyday. The technology is proven and now engineers refine it. It’s based on fire being hot, and the subsequent historical discovery around combustion. They are developed across the world, in different countries, with research around them coming from various scientific sources globally.

It’s a short jump from there to something like climate change. Humans pour ~37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year into an atmosphere that’s only ~62 miles thick. The effects of an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide are well-known and visible today on Venus. The same basic chemistry concepts that build an internal combustion engine tell us what will happen as more carbon goes into the atmosphere: the atmosphere will get warmer.

And, when we can see the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere going up at a steady pace starting when humans were industrialized and line that up with known geological knowledge (past climates), we can match the visible evidence against the already-known theories around carbon dioxide, and can make the reasonable conclusion that climate change is real and is happening.

This can be applied to any problem humans face, it just takes the time for science, working globally across funding sources, disciplines, and nations to define the variables associated with each new challenge humanity creates or faces and communicate those findings to an informed public.