[Avodah] kashering caeser stone

[Micha Berger]

On Mon, April 23, 2007 4:58 pm, R Daniel Israel wrote:
:>An alloy like steel or 14K gold would be a single chemical.

: I'm pretty sure that this is not quite correct.  Alloys are in some
: ways more like mixtures than compounds....

You're right I oversimplified, but I believe they are closer to
compounds. The subject of whether alloys are compounds or mixtures is
debated on the "talk" pages of the relavent wikipedia entries. They're
not sure. Metals have metallic bonds, a bunch of nuclei bonded
together by a soup of electrons. They aren't molecules of atoms held
together by electrons shared within the molecule in covalent bonds.

But that question aside, the point remains that the elements in still
are related in a way very differently than quartz glued together with
resin. We're talking about beli'ah -- the porosity of the whole is
that of steel, not of the individual items.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             Spirituality is like a bird: if you tighten
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