Fire

Last night I was party to a back garden science experiment. We were over at Fro and Nate's house enjoying a fire they had on their patio. The smell of burning wood, the sight of flames leaping toward the dark sky and a few bottles of beer is the perfect way to spend an evening. But where there's fire there's messin'. Various objects were lobbed into the fire and turned to ash. Then somebody tossed a beer bottle into the flames. We watched the bottle slowly begin to glow, taking on an orange lava type color. Slowly but surely the glass reached its "softening point."

Softening point: The temperature at which glass will deform under its own weight.

We watched in drunken fascination as the bottle sagged and folded over on itself. When taken out of the fire on the end of a stick it quickly cooled and became brittle. End of experiment, end of story.