The Day After Tomorrow

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Forgive me if this has already come up

I have just watched 'The Day After Tomorrow' and amid the many implausibilities one scene stands out
The folk are stuck in the library and to prevent the cold snap from getting them they build up the fire in the fireplace. Apart from the obvious, that putting whole books onto a fire will most likely put it out, fire needs Fuel, Oxygen and Heat to sustain itself. Surely the cold would remove the heat and put the fire out?

Am I missing something (other than Hollywood licence)?

Like most of us I have aspergers and this is driving me nuts.

The Terminator always bothered me How John Connor sent a man back in time who became his father. How did John Connor exist in the first place to send his father back in time to have sex with his mother to create him?

I don't have a problem with that one and consider it to be a closed self fulfilling loop, not a chicken and egg situation. It depends how you perceive time; the problem only exists if you consider it to be totally linear.

^perhaps it was a bit like Zaphods "an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine"

I suspec you are thinking that "cold" exists - it doesn't. t is just a word that describes lesser levels of heat, down to absolute zero, when there is no heat (movement of molecules).

Also, to sustain a fire, you just need an exothermic reaction. I.e. "fuel" + "oxygen", where oxygen is really just an example. The chemicals don't even have to include oxygen. Sodium burns spectacularly in chlorine.

And, yes, the scene portrayed in "The Day After Tomorrow", IIRC, is pretty stupid. I suspect that leaving the books on the shelves - as insulating material - would last better, and finding some food to sustain body temperature would be more useful.

Smart as paint ye arrrreee!

That is the paradox that makes the idea of backward time travel absurd.

It is also a denial of Free Will, which might or might not be true.

ruveyn

It depends how you look at it. The classical argument is going back in time and killing your father before you were conceived. Therefore you were not born, hence did not go back in time therefore you were born after all.

However, getting somewhat more speculative, from a multiverse point of view there could simply be two offshoots of time here, two universes unfolding, one where you were born and one where you are not, then the paradox is irrelevant.

Also, I seem to remember from physics many years ago that some particle interactions can happen in a very strange way where the effect happens before the cause! This somewhat kicks common sense in the head as time is not linear in all cases or as simple as people generally conceive.

I understand this, to put it another way would the heat from the fire move towards the area of minimal heat, thereby putting the fire out. In other words can you sustain a fire in such a situation

Lack of heat alone can not put out such an exothermic chemical reaction. It will only cause the heat to rapidly dissipate when the fire goes out, meaning there's no more material to burn. The fire burns because an initial input of energy/heat causes the bonds of the molecules in the books to break, which gives off much more heat than that required to break them. This heat given off not only continues to break more bonds in the books, but there's enough energy given off that the fire gives off heat, warming the meatsicles huddled around it. Think of it like riding a bike a few hundred feet uphill to go a mile downhill on the other side.

This works well because the books are piled on top of each other, if you were to put one book about a few inches apart from another and set one on fire, then the cold could possibly be so extreme that it causes the second book to not burst into flames. It's dependent on how much the second book bursting into flames is dependent on convection of heat instead of the radiated heat being given off by the first.

I think the whole thing was a metaphor for civilization ending (what are books for now that we've trashed the planet? Books are fuel...me are Hollywood...

Fuel, Oxygen, and Head, is usually all you need for a good fire...