How do scientists figure out things like the effect of adding fuel to fire? Can they measure ahead of time like 1 cup of gas = 5 mins of burn time at 500°?
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It depends on the context. It’s straightforward to calculate how much energy will be released in total, but the rate at which it will be released can be more complicated. If you are talking about, say, a specific internal combustion engine, it’s just a matter of doing experiments (or looking up the data from past experiments) and doing some interpolation. If you’re talking about throwing something on a fire, then it is going to depend on what state the fire and the fuel are in to begin with. A lot of rich mathematics has been developed to model fires (e.g. google “activation energy asymptotics”).
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