> Wikipedia is still going with black body radiation as the source of the yellow color of fire. Wow. The flame section is pretty terrible and most claims aren'

> Wikipedia is still going with black body radiation as the source of the yellow color of fire. Wow. The flame section is pretty terrible and most claims aren't cited (I'm pretty sure many of them are also wrong, which hopefully makes citations more difficult to come by). GP's point about heating metal to an equivalent temperature (and thus color) is correct AFAIK. Interestingly enough Wikipedia actually has an annotated experimental spectrum of a blue flame elsewhere. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spectrum_of_blue_flame.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spectrum_of_blue_flame.pn...) > Maybe I should find better sources, although normal wikipedia is great for physics. It's indispensable as a time saving overview and index to primary sources. As with any encyclopedia (any non-expert body of text really) you can't trust every last detail to be correct.