How can fire spread? Isn’t it just a chemical reaction? What about other reactions? Is there a reason they don’t spread?
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Fundamentally “burning” is something falling apart and releasing the energy that was holding it together. Think about taught ropes snapping and then flying around. The input to break those bonds is energy and since you’re releasing stores energy in this reaction, it can kick off the same reaction in things nearby if they also only need energy to react the same way which releases more energy, etc…etc… The reaction generates it’s own input in a cycle.
This is very different from a reaction that requires material as an input, like an acid for example. In that case the reaction uses up its inputs and doesn’t release more of that input so it will fizzle out and stop as soon as the original input has all undergone the reaction and been used up.
There reactions with materials that do generate more of the input material, but most often you’re getting into things like proteins copying themselves or other really complex molecular interactions.
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