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Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock

Todays candles have been optimized for millenia not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, we can undo all of these optimizations and the resulting triplet will start t…

Now, there is a particularly fascinating effect that has more recently been the subject of publications in scientific journals : When several candles are brought close to each other, they start to “communicate” and their behavior synchronizes. The heated flame with all its combustion products contains ionized molecules to some degree and is likely to have different dielectric properties compared to the surrounding air, which will be observed as either a change of capacitance or increased electrical loss. Alternatively, an advanced implementation using a software-implemented DPLL might provide a bit more stability in case of excessive noise or missing zero crossings, but this was not attempted for now.

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