On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Justin wrote:
As for "sublimate", when you toss a cup of boiling water into the air at extremely cold temperatures it converts straight into a gas, all at once. That's what I was talking about. A chemist I bumped into with that story called it sublimation, and when I said I thought "sublimate" was meant for solids only, he said no, that instantaneous conversion to a gas is sublimation whether origin state is a solid or liquid.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(chemistry) "Sublimation of an element or substance is a conversion between the solid and the gaseous states with no liquid intermediate stage." -------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.britannica.com/search?query=sublimation&ct=&fuzzy=N "sublimation: "in physics, conversion of a substance from the solid to the vapour state without its becoming liquid. An example is the vaporization of frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) at ordinary atmospheric ..." --------------------------------------------------------------------------
I very seriously doubt that.
That "chemist" sounds full of shit. Boiling, evaporation, condensation, sublimation, melting, and freezing have nothing to do with the speed at which the phase change occurs. They refer to the qualitative aspect of state changes, notably the beginning, (transition,) and ending states. Sublimation is solid->gas with no intervening liquid state, that state being impossible due to prevailing pressure/temperature conditions.
Yep. -- Jim Dixon jdd@dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure