QUESTION: Why is the flame on a gas stove blue instead of red or orange?
ANSWER: This gets heavy. Is fire the same thing as flame? What is "burning"? Where there's smoke is there always fire? Why can't you light a big thick log with a match? Why are dismissed employees "fired"? Who performed the 1970s dance hit "Fire?"The first thing you have to realize is that when we see fire, a scientist sees merely an extremely fast chemical reaction. This is why they're no fun on a camping trip. "Lovely fire, isn't it," you say. The scientist answers, "Yeah, great oxidation, but I'm unimpressed with those hydrocarbon radicals."
You see, a fire is nothing more or less than a very hot chemistry experiment. Let's take propane as an example. That's C3H8, which is to say, three carbon atoms and eight hydrogen atoms. It's a fairly rickety construction, and would prefer, quite frankly, to collapse into a simpler state. So you come along with a match, heat up those propane molecules - which means get them zipping around at high speeds - and set off a rapid chain reaction. The C3H8 starts colliding with and combining with O2, the oxygen in the air, and once the breakdown is complete all you have left is a bunch of invisible CO2 and H2O, which is carbon dioxide and water. Just as a collapsing building gives off a deafening roar, so too does the propane give off heat and light as it breaks down into carbon dioxide and water.
Your stove, when supplied with the right kind of gas, can create a clean fire with no unsightly smoke or soot. Smoke and soot is just carbon that didn't get hooked up properly with any oxygen. The famous proverb should say, "Where there's smoke, there's an inefficiently burning fire." This is also why you can't light a log with a match: You got too much wood and too little air.
Orange or red flames come from hot carbon atoms that haven't burned. As a rule, the more efficient the burn, the bluer the flames. Why blue? Different fuels have different colors when they burn. Put a little sodium in a fire and you get yellow; put some metals in there and you get green or even purple. That's the secret of the color of fireworks.
Employees get "fired" when they are explosively discharged, the same way a bullet is "fired" from a gun when the gunpowder suddenly burns.
QUESTION: Why is contemporary art and architecture now called "postmodern"?
ANSWER: You can't help but feel old and crotchety when you see a book with a title like "A History of Postmodern Architecture." That's an actual book. The modern era? Over. Even postmodernism already has a "history." Get the Geritol.
Of course, "modern" still has the generic meaning of "recent," of "hap'nin' right now." Modern art and architecture are usually considered synonymous with 20th Century art and architecture, but that's a fairly arbitrary cutoff point. People have used the term "modern" to refer to their own period ever since the Renaissance. Among academics, "Modern History" still refers to the period since 1500 A.D.
Semantics aside, there has been a distinct change in art and architecture that signals the demise of what we all consider Modernism. Modernism was infested with The Theory: The past was execrable, the domain of ignorance and despots, and had to be rejected.
Ornamental architecture, for example, was deemed to be bourgeois, undemocratic. Begone, Corinthian columns! Buildings were of steel and glass, endlessly repeated units and pods that revealed their function and internal structure in order to better reflect the prospect of a new egalitarian world. Painting abandoned the pretense of trying to accurately reproduce the real world. Artists concentrated on the media themselves; the paint, the colors, the shapes, until finally you had Jackson Pollock just hurling the stuff onto a giant canvas.
Modernism officially ended (a few experts somehow decided) at 3:32 p.m. on July 15, 1972, when dynamite mercifully brought down the highly modern, nearly windowless Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. It was yoo-gly. That was one of the trademarks of Modernism: At a cocktail party, buzzing on a little white wine, it was easy to be seduced by The Theory, but in the harsh light of morning you'd chew your arm off to get out of bed without waking it.
The Theory became a drag. It wasn't fun anymore! Hence, postmodern art and architecture is a Romper Room of giddy excess, nostalgia, melodrama, camp, all the things that weren't allowed before. No longer is the past or popular culture rejected: Postmodernism takes inspiration from the Jetson's and Caesars Palace, as well as from the Pantheon. Let's put some really cool Greek temple ruins in the middle of the new Civic Center! Let's stick rhinestones on a piano and call it art!
Now even postmodernism is supposedly dead. The next movement? No one knows. Though we would humbly suggest the perfect name: Bride of Postmodernism.
QUESTION: Why do golfers use the words "bogey"?
ANSWER: At the turn of the 20th Century, golfers were still referring to their scores purely by number, say, a three or four. No one talked about shooting "par" for the course or for a particular hole. As it became established that each hole had a certain specific level of difficulty and ought to require a specific number of shots - in those days, four, five or six strokes - players began to refer to a mythical opponent, "Colonel Bogey." "Bogey" and "bogeyman" were words for ghosts. In other words, you weren't just challenging yourself to make par, you were challenging yourself to match the ghost player. If you succeeded, you scored a "bogey." Then balls got livelier and a bogey became too easy. Bogey now means one over par. But the question that we just can't get out of our minds is: Why do golfers wear such horrid clothes? We're entertaining answers. Write.
Send questions to Why Things Are, Tropic Magazine, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132.