Can Ice Burn and Tin Melt in Hot Water?

Settled in 1965 by phase-diagram physics of melting/boiling (pressure- and composition-dependence); Soviet discovery and study of natural gas hydrates by Yuri F. Makogon and colleagues.

This double-barreled sophism plays on the assumption that a substance's everyday name (ice, tin) fixes its physical properties absolutely. In reality, 'burning ice' is a genuine phenomenon (natural gas hydrates, extensively studied in the USSR from the mid-1960s after their discovery in permafrost and later at the Messoyakha gas field), while ordinary tin melting in boiling water is genuinely impossible under normal conditions because its melting point lies well above water's boiling point at atmospheric pressure. Lange's Chapter 5 ('Molecular Physics') problem likely uses this contrast to teach readers to check specific numerical values (melting/boiling points, chemical composition) rather than rely on category intuitions.

One half of the claim sounds absurd but is real science (gas-hydrate ice that burns); the other half sounds plausible but is flatly false (tin's melting point) — testing whether the reader checks the numbers rather than the vibe.

Explanations that circulated

• Assuming 'ice' always means ordinary frozen water and can therefore never burn, when in fact methane-clathrate 'gas hydrate' ice — an ice-like solid that traps flammable methane gas inside its crystal lattice — genuinely ignites and burns when a flame is applied, releasing the trapped gas; this was studied intensively by Soviet geologists (notably Y. F. Makogon) in the 1960s, contemporaneous with Lange's book.
• Assuming boiling water can supply whatever heat is needed to melt any metal placed in it, ignoring that plain water at normal atmospheric pressure cannot exceed 100°C, far below tin's melting point of about 232°C — so ordinary pure tin cannot melt in boiling water no matter how long it sits there (only special low-melting alloys, such as Wood's metal or Field's metal, melt below 100°C).

References

• Natural gas-hydrates — A potential energy source for the 21st century, Yuri F. Makogon, Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, 2005