Quote Originally Posted by Andrew_Pavlik View Post
Did you ever find out the answer? It seems more of a riddle then an ME question. Even if you could add the heat due to friction, just plain olive oil couldn't heat up enough from friction to burn someone, well not from the height that it would drop. Also he never gave you the height of the eater there for obviously it had nothing to do with how far it travels.

I mean olive oil can burn, well be used for lamps and such, but you'd have to get it pretty hot. So I guess it's pretty easy to prove it's not possible, oils burn around something like ~350'C so you could say that in order for the oil to burn, it would have been at temps much higher then to cause a burn also it would have been on fire unlike a boiling drop of water.
nope, never found the answer. all i can think is maybe he wanted us to assume it started super hot, so hot that it would be impossible and as you said, would combust. but that part was unclear and unless told otherwise, i'm gonna assume this guy didn't get his olive oil from his personal star microwave so it'd be hot enough for it to happen. i'm gonna assume it started at room temp because that's what people do. it's practical. it's engineering. and EVEN IF we assume it started super hot and somehow didn't combust or turn to vapor, and that it'd be cooling down as it decended, we're still not given how hot it had to be to burn the guy or how long it fell. he tells us it falls long enough to reach its terminal velocity of 200 kph, but doesn't say how long it fell at that speed or how high the balcony was. we also don't have the mass of the droplet, nor the surface area.