Can Spontaneous Human Combustion REALLY Happen?

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Now, I recently went down a rabbit hole on something called spontaneous human combustion, and I wanted to talk about is that a real phenomenon or is it something just totally misunderstood and not real at all. Now, the most famous case of this, the one everybody points to when you talk about spontaneous combustion is an unfortunate woman named Mary Reer. In 1951, she was found burned, completely burned, nothing left over, sitting in a recliner. So, she was totally combusted. part of the chair was burned. Nothing else in the room was actually on fire or even scorched. And so the question is, can the human body under certain circumstances, in certain conditions, can it generate enough internal body heat to actually spontaneously combust without an external ignition source? The short answer is no. It's not possible. In fact, when you look at these cases, and I've looked at several of them in detail, when you get past the headlines, when you really look at them in any great detail, you'll find that most of the cases, they were usually smoking or had some other ignition source nearby.

[00:01:08]It wasn't totally clear what was really going on, but it's plausible that a lot of people fall asleep smoking cigarettes, and that is actually the cause of most of these cases. But there's a little more to it if you stick with me. Now the human body does generate its own internal heat. Uh when you get a fever for instance, your body temperature gets elevated. Our whole body is geared to regulate internal temperatures. And how is that heat generated? Well, there are chemical reactions inside the cell that release energy, exothermic reactions. Energy is what causes our body temperature to be maintained. Now, to actually catch a human body on fire, it would need to reach activation energy or kindling energy, something like 500 degrees Fahrenheit would be what that would be needed. But our typical body temperature is held at around 98.6°.

[00:01:57]So, the chemistry in our body is just not possible to go from maintaining that typical body temperature about 100° Fahrenheit five times higher in order to selfignite. But the bigger problem is that our bodies are around 70 or 80% water. And water is an incredible heat sink. It can absorb a lot of energy and then phase change away, taking the heat away. It's difficult to burn wet things.

[00:02:22]Now, in many of these cases, they think what happened is called the wick effect.

[00:02:26]There's a lot of fat in the body, and when that fat gets melted, it can kind of wick through the clothing and slowly burn over time. Today I want to talk about what scientists thought the idea of heat was back in the 1700s and the early 1800s and how it compares to what we learned to be true over time. Of course, people would observe very hot things like this molten metal with a shower of sparks. It's very very hot and then over time it would cool off. It would stop glowing so much and change what we now call the temperature of the object. We can see that from a cup of coffee. We have a very hot cup of coffee. We have some steam coming off spontaneously and without you doing anything. Over time that coffee will go from very very hot to much much cooler.

[00:03:10]It'll get down to what we call room temperature. Spontaneously. People were trying to explain this for literally hundreds of years but didn't quite know how it worked because partly because they didn't really know about the modern atomic theory of matter. So for instance, here is a bolt here. This half has been put in a blowtorrch. It's very very hot and it's glowing. It's obviously hotter on one end. It will cool off spontaneously going to a lower temperature. Now, scientists in the 1700s and the early 1800s actually believed that the concept of heat came from an invisible fluid called caloric.

[00:03:45]That was the name caloric. You can uh understand that our current word calorie kind of comes from the word caloric. And they thought that this caloric was almost like a fluid that could be transferred between two different objects. So for instance, if this bolt is surrounded in the air, you know, there's more caloric in the bolt and it gets transferred much like water coming out of a glass or air diffusing through a room and it would be moving the heat through this invisible fluid from the hot item into the cold item. So they thought it was a physical substance. Now there were many experiments done over time and by the mid 1800s we understood that mechanical work meaning moving objects can actually contribute to heat as well. heating something up. They did experiments with cannons. Of course, you can you can understand the heat there from the from the propulsion of the cannonball, but actually just the physical rubbing of the bore by the cannonball can actually heat it up. So, they knew that moving and and friction between matter somehow is involved in the concept of heat and temperature.

[00:04:47]Now, scientists like James Clerk Maxwell, Titans of their day, along with James Juel, figured out that heat and temperature were really related to the microscopic motions of atoms. Now, this culminated in equations that governed the kinetic theory of matter, the temperature of an object being related to the mass of the particles, the velocity of the molecules moving around, the average of the squares of the velocity, and something called the Boltzman constant. Today I'd like to share with you the absolute coolest thing that I actually know about atoms.

[00:05:20]And that is that in a nutshell, even when an electron is orbiting uh around a atom, even a simple hydrogen atom, that electron has a nonzero probability of actually being all the way across the universe light years away. So that's the fact even when electrons are orbiting atoms or molecules the way wave functions work and probabilities work is that there is a actual chance that the electron could be near the atom but actually also could be 15 light years that way. Now to wrap your brain around this you have to forget about the idea that an electron is a ball orbiting like a solar system because that is not what quantum theory says and we know electrons definitely do not behave this way. Basically, an electron is a wavy thing. It has wave characteristics and the wave function that governs the electron really represents the probability of finding the electron when you measure it. But when you're not measuring it, it exists in a wavelike state that has these beautiful shapes uh around the hydrogen atom. So these are the this is the hydrogen wave function and these are basically different solutions of the Schroinger equation in quantum mechanics which give these guys.

[00:06:37]So back in algebra you used to solve equations and get multiple solutions all the time like for the quadratic formula.

[00:06:43]Well in quantum mechanics you can get multiple solutions which depend on what we call quantum numbers and the different solutions have different beautiful shapes almost like different graphs back in algebra. Now these different shapes govern the probability of finding the electron in different positions. If the electron is in this configuration then it'll it'll look like it's uh closer to the nucleus but it also can have these loed configurations where the black areas are where the electron definitely is not and the probability is higher in the brighter regions. But the crucial thing to point out here is that notice there's a fuzzy boundary here around all of these things. Everything's fuzzy. And that means the probability of finding an electron in any of these cases never goes to zero. Even when you get really far away from the atom, it just gets closer and closer and closer to zero, but always above zero. Here is the wave function for an electron around a hydrogen atom. There's a constant here.

[00:07:42]The constant doesn't matter. E to the minus r. That's all I want you to focus on. Now, when you square that wave function, that's what gives you the probability density. you end up with an e to the minus2r there. That means as the radius you get farther and farther away from the atom, the probability never gets to zero. It just gets infinitely close to zero. You may have heard of the healing power of energy vibrations. With the right frequency and the right vibration, you can heal your body from everything from skin blemishes to cancer. Is that a real thing? The short answer is no. Absolutely not. Now what they did is they borrowed some terms from physics to make it sound nice and dress it up. Vibration, frequency, energy and it all sounds legitimate in science. Vibration is a very specific thing. Here is the electromagnetic spectrum. You see the vibrations here is the wiggliness or the vibrations of the electromagnetic field that propagate together as a wave through space. The idea of an oscillation is when something moves back and forth in a repeating fashion. Now, moving away from electromagnetism to matter, you have atoms that are in a lattice. For instance, in this particular piece of matter here, now at room temperature or any temperature, all of these atoms are vibrating. They're bonded, but the thermal energy is causing them to agitate or vibrate. Vibration just means back and forth oscillation about some common equilibrium point. The best example of an oscillation would be somebody on a swing back and forth. You can define a frequency. how many times per second that person goes back and forth. Now, a crystal might look beautiful and it does have atoms that are in a lattice just like in the picture, and they are vibrating like that because they're at some temperature above absolute zero. But those vibrations, even though they have fancy sounding words that sound scientific, they have absolutely no bearing on healing your body, which is also made of atoms. When you hold this thing in your hand, you know, you at room temperature, your the atoms of your hand are vibrating. The atoms of the crystal are vibrating, but there's no invisible energy coming out of this crystal into your body. And even if it were, it would be random thermal oscillations that would do absolutely nothing for the healing processes of the body, which involve your blood cells and all of the defense mechanisms to attack foreign invaders in your body. Along the lines of vibrations and energy and crystals, you may have heard of an energy vortex.

[00:10:12]You can go to certain places where they say that the vortices are all around in the surrounding environment and if you stand in one it will heal you. A vortex is a swirling bit of of fluid of some kind usually like a water going down a drain. Energy does not make a vortex. It flows from one place to another like photons or heat can can move the thermal agitation down the line and and transfer energy in the form of heat. But energy doesn't form a vortex. And all it would do if it hit you is going to vibrate you. And if the photons of energy are high enough, they can disrupt the atoms of your body and actually harm you.

[00:10:49]Certainly not heal you. Now, here's a question for you. If lightning is happening all the time around the planet and carries so much electricity, why don't we actually use it to power our electrical grid? After all, lightning actually strikes the planet about 150,000 times per hour all across the globe.

[00:11:12]That's about 44 times every second. So, why can't we actually harness all of this free energy to power our electricity? Now, the biggest problem with trying to contain lightning, something like this going on all the time is that even though it's literally striking 44 times every second around the planet somewhere, the problem is it's totally intermittent and very difficult to predict exactly where the lightning is going to strike. So, that means harnessing it and storing it is really, really difficult. Even if you kind of predict it's going to strike a city, you don't know exactly where inside of that city it's going to hit.

[00:11:49]So storing it makes it really hard. Now here's the deal with lightning. The electricity in there is just hard to imagine. Something like a billion volts of electric potential. Something like 30,000 amps in every strike. That makes it really difficult. We don't have the infrastructure set up to handle that kind of surging electric current. It would require a total rearchitecture of everything we use to send electricity around the country. Now the deal with lightning is there's very high voltage and very high current but also for a very short duration. A typical lightning strike really only lasts about a microscond. That's very very short. And so each bolt actually only has about 1 to 10 billion jewels of pure energy that can be delivered in that narrow window.

[00:12:38]And so the problem with that is even though it's intense, it's very short.

[00:12:42]Each bolt of lightning could probably power a average home for a few days or so. Um, but that's it. So really, in order to harness it, you'd have to harness lots of lightning bolts all over the place. And as we mentioned, they're pretty intermittent and spread out over a large area. There are other problems, too. To store the lightning bolt, you would need banks of something called a super capacitor with special architecture to store such high energy.

[00:13:10]And you would also need a distribution system to interface the DC of a lightning bolt with the AC of our power grid. So in short, it's just not practical, but it is a really cool idea to ponder. Learn anything at math andcience.com.