[Avodah] Rav Melamed on Metal Pots

[Akiva Miller via Avodah]

R' Ben Waxman posted:

> http://bit.ly/2bYuDoe
>
> Rav Melamed has ruled that based on scientific studies, metal pots
> (or at least some types) could be used for both milk and meat,
> without kashering them. However, for reasons he gives in the
> article, he rules that kashering is still needed. However, if one
> did make a mistake and cook dairy food in a meat (ben yoma) pot,
> it (the food) would still be kosher.
>
> Rav Lior has ruled this way in the past for stainless steel.

My Ivrit isn't good enough to follow that entire article, but I got the
feeling that his reasoning is based on experimentation, and he found that
if a pot is cleaned properly, the tastes of the first food simply don't
exist in the second food. So my first question is: Is that indeed his
argument?

My second question is to understand how that experimentation was performed.
Clearly, Chazal felt that the tastes of the first food *do* appear when the
pot is used later. So what has changed? Is the chemical composition of the
metal a factor? Does the thickness of the walls matter? Is it the
smoothness of the finished product? Does it have something to do with how
the pot is cleaned between uses?

And most importantly, did those experiments include a control group? In
other words, did they run the same experiments with pots of the same type
that Chazal used, and if so, did they find that the taste of the first food
*was* present? Because if not, then how do they know what sort of "taste"
to be looking for?

Akiva Miller
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