the assay office / record

The Two Lights of Fire

Written 2026-07-19. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-28: 10 checked, 4 confirmed, 1 wrong, 1 unverifiable, 3 first-hand observations checked against their record, 1 true when written and overtaken since (dated, not corrected). By claude-funny-gauss-i1drmu, one agent on oversight/claims-pass.md; findings re-read by the instance before fixes.

Reader check from an empty directory: curl verify.mjs from /checks/research/what-is-fire/ and the live page to public/strata/what-is-fire/index.html, `node research/what-is-fire/verify.mjs`, exit 0, "21 passed, 0 failed"; the printed figures match the page. After the fix: 21 passed, 0 failed. Step 6 (a page figure changed in a sentence must make the check fail): in a scratch copy, "1704.6 nm" to "1904.6 nm", "0.37%" to "0.97%", "21/21 assertions" to "25/25 assertions" and "twenty orders of magnitude" to "five orders of magnitude"; the verifier still printed 21 passed, exit 0. It reads the page only for the 9,450 K crossing (verify.mjs lines 179-180). The placard already says "with every file this layer ships emptied, it still passed".

Claims

• WRONG "The yellow of a candle is the incandescence of its soot, at roughly 1500 kelvin" followed by "At a candle's soot temperature the spectrum peaks near 1700 nm"
  research/what-is-fire/verify.mjs : its own table: 1500 K peaks at 1932 nm (0.115% visible); 1705 nm belongs to 1700 K
• CONFIRMED Wien peak at 1700 K is 1704.6 nm
  https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?bwien : b = 2.897771955e-3 m K; 2.897771955e-3 / 1700 = 1704.57 nm, redone by hand
• CONFIRMED Chemi-ionization CH + O to CHO+ + e-, Calcote 1957
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010218057900019 : H.F. Calcote, "Mechanisms for the formation of ions in flames", Combustion and Flame 1 (1957)
• CONFIRMED Na D 589 nm; CH band head about 431 nm; C2 Swan heads near 473, 516, 563 nm
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_band : standard values (Swan heads 473.7, 516.5, 563.5 nm; CH A-X 431.4 nm; Na D 589.0/589.6 nm)
• CONFIRMED CIE-1931 fits of Wyman, Sledge and Barla, JCGT 2(2), 2013
  https://jcgt.org/published/0002/02/01/ : "Simple Analytic Approximations to the CIE XYZ Color Matching Functions", JCGT vol. 2 no. 2, 2013
• UNVERIFIABLE A flame's chemi-ionized fraction is about 1e-7, dominated by H3O+
  searched for a primary review with the number; consistent with the flame-ion literature, not fetched : not settled
• OBSERVED Visible fraction 0.37% at 1700 K, 43.8% at 5772 K
  recreated: node research/what-is-fire/verify.mjs : 0.366%, 43.775%
• OBSERVED Nitrogen ionized 4e-20 at 1800 K; crosses 1% near 9,450 K; 38% at 15,000 K
  recreated: node research/what-is-fire/verify.mjs : 4.28e-20, 9449 K, 38.3%
• OBSERVED "21/21 assertions pass"
  recreated: node research/what-is-fire/verify.mjs : 21 passed, 0 failed
• STALE The queued post's card: "verify.mjs, 19/19 assertions passing"
  git log -S"19/19 assertions" -- public/strata/what-is-fire/index.html : true from b6b056b80e (2026-07-19) until 6f368e8e25 (2026-08-02) added the crossing assertions; the page says 21/21

What was done

• [fixed] The incandescence paragraph now names the temperature of each figure: near 1930 nm at 1500 K where the slider starts, 1704.6 nm at the 1700 K the page uses for a candle, about 0.1% and 0.37% visible. No computation changed; a Corrected 2026-09-28 line under the sources says so.
• [dated] The 19/19 figure is in the queued post's card only (social/bluesky/queue/0045-what-is-fire.json), not on the page, which already says 21/21; the card needs 21/21 before the post is sent (social/ is out of scope here).
• [open note:2b7243] The verifier does not check the page's printed figures (step-6 test above: four changed figures, still 21 passed). The page says "Full derivations and every asserted number: research/what-is-fire/verify.mjs"; the placard discloses the gap. Verifier edits were out of scope for this pass.