 Good morning, John. I've been a person who professionally talks about science for years now. It's a wonderful job. And I love almost every question I get. There are two kinds of questions that I don't love to get. One is one that I've answered a bunch of times before and I'm like, all right, somebody else handle this one. And second is questions that seem like they should just be very easy to answer, but they aren't. And they just, they sit there and I don't answer them and I'm like, why is this so hard? And no question in this second category is more common than the title of this video. What state of matter is fire? If you ask this question to Google, you get all wrong answers. Why are we doing this to ourselves? What is so hard here? Well, we are doing this to ourselves because it is very, very, very not simple. Now matter really does mostly exist in a few discrete states. And that's literally because of how the atoms and molecules are interacting with each other. But I think what mostly sticks with us isn't like thinking about it in terms of particles. It's just sort of the qualities. So a solid keeps its shape. A liquid keeps its volume, but its shape can change and then a gas, its volume and shape can change. And if you just take that and you put it on fire, you're like, well, none of that's true. So let me instead answer this question with a question. What state of matter is a waterfall? Now you're gonna think to yourself, Hank, that's a liquid. But no, the water in the waterfall is a liquid, but the waterfall is not matter. It is a process caused by a bunch of liquid and gas and solids in a specific situation. A waterfall does not have a state of matter because a waterfall isn't matter. It's a process. Now you can look at it and you can say that cliff has made a rock and the water is a liquid and the air that's sort of tossing up those beautiful water droplets, that's a gas. So I can kind of answer the question, what state of matter is a waterfall? It's a bunch of different states of matter. And so the natural thing to do is to do this with fire. Just label the constituents. And this is why fire is harder than a waterfall because the molecules in a fire, unlike the molecules in a waterfall, are undergoing rapid chemical reactions and while those chemicals are still made of matter, they are reacting. They do not have a state of matter because their electrons are jumping from atom to atom. Molecules are rearranging and in the space between one chemical and another, we don't really know what things are because we can't put them in bottles. We can, however, stop them. I'm gonna do that for you right now. I'm gonna pause the chemical reaction while it is going on. If I pass my spoon through my fire, what I get is soot. And this is why a lot of people say that the state of matter of fire is a solid. What is happening in this fire is that wax is evaporating and then it is combusting. It's burning. In the process of that combustion, lots of different weird chemicals are formed and they all turn into these little tiny particles that in the flame, while they are undergoing chemical reaction, glow with their own heat. As they continue through the flame, they continue to react and at the end of this process, you don't have that solid anymore. But in there, most of what you see as the fire is solid pieces of soot glowing. But there's also a component of the flame, the blue part to be exact, that is not caused by soot particles glowing. This is excited atoms of gas emitting light as well. But also because there's so many reactions happening so quickly in combustion, a lot of the matter in a flame isn't behaving like how we think matter behaves because it's in the midst of a chemical reaction. So those atoms and electrons and ions and molecules and in-betweening molecules, they kind of aren't any state of matter. And maybe we will understand all of that better someday, but really it's just a place where these usually quite hard lines between things kind of breaks down. For me though, there's a real answer here that's all much simpler than this. Fire does not have a state of matter because fire is not matter. Fire is a process. John, I'll see you on Wednesday. To Wednesday, Tuesday. By the way, this year's Project for Awesome calendar is now available. We do it a little before the Project for Awesome so you can actually have it. This year's calendar celebrates a lot of the history of dirt bacteria with different images from kind of different eras of this wonderful, bizarre thing that also is very difficult to describe.