What happens to the flame when a candle is blown out? Where does it go? This is an image, in the form of a question, that my mind always invokes when people talk about a "soul" that still exists after a person's death. Spiritual abracadbra follows. I am interested in, rather naively, is a physical explanation. Despite everything I have read about fire and flames, including Michael Faraday's legendary Christmas lectures on fire, it is one element that still strikes me as mysterious. Any answer? :)
What happens to the car when ignition is switched off? By the way those Christmas lectures were for kids.
Sir,
The usual flame as of a candle requires three factors to exist: A
combustible substance to be burnt, oxygen and sufficiently high temperature
for the combustion to be maintained. Once the burning is initiated, it
generates heat sufficient to maintain the necessary temperature (it is sort
of chain reaction)
When you blow on the flame, the heat is carried away and the wick gets
cooled so that there is no more burning; i.e the there is separation of the
three; you may even say that the flame is carried away by the wind blown; I
think I can even see this, for a small distance.
This is beautifully explained by the two Malayalam words for burning and
separation.
കത്തുക (to burn) becomes അകത്തുക (double meaning of to separate (അകത്തുക) and to not burn (അ-കത്തുക) i.e കത്തുക is negativized by the word initial a. This is so despite the rule that word initial privative a is absent in
Malayalam! What a beautifully designed word pair! What a Faculty of
Language the creator of this word pair must have had!!
Narayanan Bhattathiri
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