While the Spousal Unit and I were entertaining an out-of-town friend at Takami, (a great new downtown LA rooftop neo-sushi bar) on Friday night, one of our local pals was really getting into the spirit of things at a UCLA Physics Department bash. He allowed himself to be persuaded to walk across a bed of piping hot coals in a demonstration of firewalking. Now that's a committed physics professor! The upshot? As we were downing our second Lotus Blossom martini and savoring the spicy albacore tuna sashimi -- a specialite de la maison -- poor David was being escorted home with badly blistered feet, and spent the rest of the night soaking his very sore soles in cold water. His enterprising students caught the whole thing on video, and thoughtfully posted it on the Internets for your viewing pleasure. (Listen carefully, and you can hear David exclaim at the very end, "This actually hurts...")
I'm sympathetic to his suffering, unlike Jen-Luc Piquant, who revels in the misfortunes of others. (Schadenfreude is her middle name, or it would be, should she ever get it legally changed from the decidedly non-mellifluous "Marie-Evangeliste.") But some obvious questions arose in my mind. First, the UCLA party was supposed to be Tesla-themed, so what the heck does firewalking have to do with that? Tesla played with electricity, not actual fire, although both can burn, and Tesla did like showy demonstrations with a strong possibility of injury. Maybe that was the rationale. Second, and more to the point, shouldn't a guy smart enough to get a PhD in physics know better than to walk across hot coals?
Like many things in life, firewalking is a bit of a misnomer, since people are really walking barefoot over a bed of hot coals instead of actual flames. The earliest known reference to the practice can be found in an Indian story dating to around 1200 BC, but firewalking shows up in cultures all over the world, spanning thousands of years. Not surprisingly, it's often associated with religious rituals (eg, in certain Eastern Orthodox communities in Greece and Bulgaria), or done to demonstrate the mystical powers of, say, Indian fakirs. You'll also find firewalking in Polynesia, among Japanese Taoists and Buddhists, and performed by certain bushmen in the Kalahari desert as part of their healing ceremonies.
In modern-day America, the practice is more crassly commercial. Sometime in the 1970s, an enterprising snake oil salesman motivational author named Tolly Burkan started offering evening firewalking courses to the public, selling it as a kind of New Age way of confronting one's fears and asserting mind over matter, emerging with a stronger sense of empowerment as a result. Or something. Think "Fear to Power" instead of "Will to Power." He's since founded The Firewalking Institute for Research and Education, and describes the practice as "a method of overcoming limiting beliefs, phobias, and fears." But he doesn't claim that anything supernatural or paranormal is necessarily going on, which is smart, because the science behind firewalking has by now been pretty well documented.
David isn't the first scientifically minded sort to engage in firewalking: noted skeptic Mike Shermer has done it, as has Jearl Walker, a former columnist for Scientific American who has performed firewalking and other insane feats in classroom demonstrations, memorably commenting, "There is no classroom demonstration so riveting as one in which the teacher may die." (No doubt David's physics students would agree.) A physics professor in Pittsburgh named David Willey does it all the time, and has arguably done the most in recent years to spread the word about the underlying physics behind safe firewalking.
There's even been the odd scientific study of what's involved, scientifically, in the firewalking phenomenon, beginning with one performed in the mid-1930s by the University of London Council for Psychical Research. That study concluded that the secret of the successful firewalk is as simple as the low thermal conductivity of the burning wood-turned-to-coal, an insulating layer of ash, and the short time of contact between the hot coals and the soles of the feet. Per Willey: "What I believe happens when one walks on fire is that on each step the foot absorbs relatively little heat from the embers that are cooled, because they are poor conductors, that do not have much internal energy to transmit as heat, and further that the layer of cooled charcoal between the foot and the rest of the hot embers insulates them from the coals." (Check out some of the "firewalking" hyperlinks if you want more on the specifics of heat conduction, etc.)
Armed with that kind of background knowledge, it's not surprising David figured he'd try his hand at it. But if firewalking is supposed to be so safe, and un-magical, and rooted in sound science, why did he get blisters all over the soles of his feet? Well, like most scientific experiments, you have to set them up and perform them correctly to replicate successful results; there's not much margin for error. People do get hurt in such stunts; in 2002, about 20 managers with the KFC fast food chain in Australia were treated for firewalking-related burns. (Insert your own lame "fried chickens" joke here.) Guess that whole "mind over matter, confronting your fears, blah, blah, blah" mantra didn't work so well for them.
I wasn't there to witness David's firewalking, so I can only surmise about what might have gone wrong. The most obvious explanation is that David lingered a bit too long in one place while walking over the bed of hot coals. Except I did see the video, and he seemed to be moving across it pretty quickly. (I, personally, would have bolted across. While wearing protective, flame-retardant shoes.) So maybe there was something not quite right with the set-up. It's critical that the coals be allowed to burn down sufficiently so that they are at a relatively comfy 538 degrees Celsius or so (1000 degrees Fahrenheit), preferably with a thin layer of ash over them providing a bit of extra insulation. This process also burns off any excess water content in the coals; any remaining water would increase both the heat capacity and thermal conductivity of the coals. It's equally critical to make sure no bits of metal have found their way into the coals, because metal has very high thermal conductivity.
Perhaps David could have further lessened his risk of injury by dampening his feet beforehand (the so-called "Leidenfrost" effect, in which a thin layer of sweat or water instantly forms an insulating boundary layer of steam when exposed to intense heat). However, per Willey, this probably isn't a major factor. For one thing, it carries an added risk of coals sticking to your feet as you walk -- increasing exposure time and therefore causing the soles to burn more than if you just crossed with dry feet. (Willey prefers firewalking with dry feet, and also places a water-soaked carpet remnant at the end of the walk for immediate cooling.) Maybe it's something as simple as the fact that D. has very thin soles, and/or insufficiently calloused feet.
The upshot is that David put his faith in theory, trusting that it would be borne out by experiment, further bolstered by the knowledge that it had been borne out by experiment in the past (alas, conveniently neglecting to fully consider the numerous occasions when the experiment failed). It's always a sad thing when scientific experiments don't quite work. Consider the following exchange posted on Overheard in New York, which supposedly took place in a physics lab at City College of New York, after a less-than-satisfactory experimental result. A student points to the equipment and asks, "Um, is this broken?" And the professor (identified as being "Russian") sighs defeatedly, "No. Nothing is broken, except my heart."
For David, it's probably less the intangible pain of a broken heart over a failed experiment, and more the physical discomfort associated with "Yowza, these burn blisters hurt!" Nonetheless, I think he learned a lot from the experience, per his email after I told him I was planning a blog post on firewalking in his honor: "You can tell people that it really hurt, and no creams or sprays helped, not even 30% benzocaine. But ice water worked like a charm." His advice for any aspiring firewalkers? "It's a good idea to hoard Vicodin in advance, which I neglected to do." Heed his words, impressionable young people: David has suffered so you don't have to.
He also had a question of his own, namely, "Why does a burn feel hot even hours after the burn? It must have something to do with swelling, but why would that feel like a burn when other causes of swelling do not?" Good question. If pressed, I'd probably fall back on the first stage of wound healing: inflammation. Blood rushes to the wound site carrying new cells and other useful components for rebuilding tissue, then carries away dead cells, bacteria, and the like. Which in turn makes the wound site feel hot. But it's not the most satisfactory explanation, so commenters should feel free to weigh in with their own thoughts about why this is so. It's not like I've thoroughly consulted WebMD (a.k.a., "The Hypochondriac's Bible") on the subject. (I've been avoiding the site ever since it chastised me for being, like, the millionth person to search the terms "chronic headache" and "brain tumor." Quoth the site (in heavy underlined text): "Most headaches are not an indication of brain tumors." Implied message: "So stop asking us and take some Excedrin already!")
While David is waiting for his feet to heal, and contemplating his own folly while wondering where the firewalking experiment went so horribly wrong, we offer this funky YouTube video of a surfing rats experiment for his amusement. They're call The Radical Rodents, and we think they could give Tyson, the famous Skateboarding Bulldog, a run for his money in the YouTube "Most Downloaded" video awards category. If nothing else, they can take David's mind off the blistering pain. (UPDATE: He can also bask in the glory of being quoted in USA Today.) And once he's mobile again, we'll treat him to Lotus Blossom martinis at Takami, where he can regale the wait staff with tales of his derring-do.
I was the one who overheard that exchange at City College and submitted it to the Overheard in New York website. The professor's tone was not really defeated or sighing: it was slightly excited but not particularly happy, sad, angry, or anything. It was an offhanded comment.
Sorry to burst your bubble. But Overheard in New York entries aren't really funny if they contain too much description. :-)
Posted by: Yehuda | February 17, 2011 at 05:46 PM