Fact of the Week: How Fire Works

As a kid, I remember having been fascinated by fire. I would stare into the flames and be mesmerised. Much later on in life I found out how fire works. Here is a decsription of it from Richard Feynman's lectures:

"Now, for example, one of the oxygen molecules can come over to the carbon, and each atom can pick up a carbon atom and go flying off in a new combination - "carbon-oxygen" - which is a molecule of the gas called carbon monoxide. It is given the chemical name CO. It is very simple: the letters "CO" are practically a picture of that molecule. But carbon attracts oxygen much more than oxygen attracts oxygen or carbon attracts carbon. Therefore in this process the oxygen may arrive with only a little energy, but the oxygen and carbon will snap together with a tremendous vengeance and commotion, and eveyrthing near them will pick up the energy. A large amount of motion energy, kinetic energy, is thus generated. This of course is burning; we are getting heat from the combination of oxygen and carbon."