Physics people or just smart people...

[sendero]

... I light a match. The "base" of the flame, near the match, is blue. The middle of the flame is orange and the tip is a brighter orange.

Which portion of the flame is the hottest?

(this is not a quiz, I don't know the answer that's why I'm asking)

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. blue

[greatauntoftriplets]

2. The blue.

No background in physics, just what my mother told me.

[TheFriendlyAnarchist]

3. Blue

It has to do with the color spectrum. There's infared heat, and then red hot, orange hot, and so on and so forth. The further you go down the spectrum, the hotter it gets (that's my understanding at least. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong so I don't continue to spout bullshit)

[Fredda Weinberg]

5. Frequency of light=color=temperature

The key to making sense of this turns out to be that the energy emitted into the light comes in little packets, called quanta. High-frequency (bluish) light has high energy quanta and low-frequency (reddish) light has lower energy quanta. Temperature measures how much thermal energy is available to go into vibrating particles, etc, including the particles emitting the light. If the typical thermal energy of a particle is large compared to a quantum of light of some color, that color of light is easily emitted. But if the energy quantum is bigger than the typical thermal energy scale, those quanta hardly ever come out. So as you heat something up, first the lower energy (red) quanta show up, then also middle energy (say green), and finally they’re joined by blue quanta.

This process makes no sense in classical physics, where there’s no packet-size for light waves, so it provided the first key to the modern physics of quantum mechanics. /blockquote]http://van.physics.uiuc.edu/qa/listing.php?id=1545

[TheFriendlyAnarchist]

6. I feel like such a nerd. I actually understood that

:(

[Benfea]

8. Why is that bad? -NT

[Benfea]

7. Color = frequency. Frequency is proportional to energy.

More energy means more heat.

Your explanation was close enough. ;)

[WritingIsMyReligion]

4. the blue.

I know that! :D

[wildhorses]

9. .........

Blue, blue, my world is blue
Blue is my world since I'm without you
Gray, gray, my life is gray
Cold is my heart since you went away

Red, red, my eyes are red
Crying for you alone in my bed
Green, green, my jealous heart
I doubted you and now we're apart

When we met how the bright sun shone
Then love died, now the rainbow is gone

Black, black, the nights I've known
Longing for you so lost and alone
Gone, gone, the love we knew
Blue is my world since I'm without you.

Black, black, the nights I've known
Longing for you so lost and alone
Blue, blue, my world is blue
Blue is my world since I'm without you

[rug]

10. You're not posting from an airplane, are you?

[sendero]

11. Thanks folks..

... I have a soldering iron that doesn't get as hot as it should. I light a match to give it a boost when I'm about to melt a big blob of solder. Now I know where to hold the match against the iron :)