Cauldron that lit the Paris Olympics with water out

2024-08-12 12:18:28

The closing of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games extinguishes the most iconic of symbols: the Olympic flame. Nothing less than the symbol of electricity delivery to people is very expensive. Prometheus. The exemplary punishment which the Titans paid for their bravery must have left the gods with some grief when thousands of years later they continued to allow us to light the fire with the sun’s rays themselves.

From Berlin 1936, the flame travels from hand to hand until it ignites another symbol of greater harmony, the cauldron, which in these recent sculptures has surprised the world. The Paris Cauldron is the first fire in history without combustion and has shown that the Olympic spirit lives not by fire, nor by the heat it gives, nor by its purity, but by the fire it emits.

The difference between fire, heat and light

The cauldron of the Paris Olympics did not burn. He is the first in history to not do so. However, it has achieved a better simulation of fire with light and clouds.

For fire to exist there must be combustion. Fire is a mixture of gases in which a chemical reaction, combustion, takes place. In it, the atoms change partners and recombine, which involves the exchange of their electrons, which releases increased energy in the form of electronic radiation. In everyday combustions (methane, butane, etc.), this radiation is the light that excites our visual system, and there is infrared heat. Depending on the gas that is burned, the reaction will occur at one temperature or another, the electrons will react in one way or another, and the light will have one color or another.

In combustion, in addition to light and heat, compounds such as water and CO₂ are formed.

Thus the Paris cauldron is the first in history in which combustion did not occur.

Earth and light

Basket Mathieu Lehanneur It preserves the essence of the message: what matters is not fire, but light.

Neither infrared, nor heat, nor those lights whose dance has fascinated man since the world was a world. The Paris Cauldron, in the shape of a beautiful globe, is illuminated with visible light from 40 LED projectors that emit a whopping 4 million lumens.

The lumensThat small number that we see on the package when we buy a light bulb, is a unit of electric current, that is, the power of visible light. And it’s essentially not a physical unit like its cousin, the watt. Lumen is a human unit, according to the specifications of those of us who have a bad habit of living under fire.

A close-up of the Olympic cauldron balloon in the Tuileries Garden during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France.
Here Now/SHutterstock

Lighten with water

Cauldron projectors do not shine in any direction, but rather towards a cloud of small nebulized droplets.. Like those installed on the terraces of the bars to cool us and water down our beer. And it is the drops that light the fire so that we can see the Olympic message. At ground level during the day and suspended from a large balloon at night.

Fire and water are old acquaintances who have long agreed to find him rainbow when we stand between the curtain of drops (rain, garden ocean …) and the Sun, which forms an angle of about 42°C. It’s all about finding the right location.

Why don’t you pick rainbows?

Can the Olympic flame produce a purple rainbow? No, if the light from the projectors does not have the same color composition (spectral composition in physical language) as sunlight. The colors of the rainbow are the result of scattering. The water falls “scatter” the lights that add natural light.

In any case, the Olympic cauldron has risen to the nickname of the City of Light. By the way, we don’t call Paris because it usually offers clear days under the bright sun, but because, according to what they say, it was the first to have modern urban lighting.

Opera Square, by Edouard Leon Cortes (1882-1969).
© Edouard Cortes

Paris was the city that welcomed the glow of light in the highest way: the bohemian painters of the last third of the 19th century soon became divided between those who loved the warmth of gas combustion and those who favored aseptic light. . Some of them even specialize in capturing the Parisian light, like Edouard Cortes who captures unforgettable moments under the lights of street lights.