What is a Flame?
Do you know what pyrolysis is? Good for you if you do but try to explain it to a child in an easy and entertaining way. If you don’t know how the video “What is Flame” will do the task for you.
“What is Flame” takes us straight to hell where a poor soul is already languishing in the fire. How can this little guy’s misery be eased? It must be torture for him to be surrounded by flames and not to know what they are. So it is explained to him with the help of a candle on a cupcake. The atoms are represented by Lego bricks, that beat each other up and cause a lot of reactions. At the end of the video viewers will at least have been familiarized with four technical terms: pyrolysis, chemiluminescence, oxidation and incandescence.
The creator of the video, Ben Ames, is a US-American, who is working on his PhD in quantum optics at the University of Innsbruck. Out of 822 international contributions his 7.30 minute film won the flame challenge, a competition where scientists had to explain “What is a flame?” in a way 11-year-olds would understand and enjoy.