I call bullshit.

Here's a list of the points in the article that jumped out at me as uninformative, pseudo-scientific or misleading:

> a laser beam producing a temperature of 10,000 degrees Celsius.

Scientifically, that's meaningless. It's meant to convey a powerful heat source to the reader, but as another reader pointed out, a strong focused light source on a bit of well-insulated black material might be able to raise it to several thousand degrees; the same source pointed at a well-polished mirror could leave it cold to the touch. In other words, the "10,000" degree figure tells us nothing useful.

> (from the allegedly supporting New Scientist article cited on the talk page): The first thing Lewis and his colleagues did was fire powerful laser pulses at the material.

What person with scientific training would set up a laser to conduct his first test on an unknown material? I admit to not being a professional NASA egghead, but if confronted with a substance alleged to be highly heat resistant, I'd start off by holding a sample of it into a Bunsen burner flame, or better yet pop it into a crucible and into a high-temperature furnace.

If a temperature of 10,000°C had really been achieved, that would have been quite impressive: according to elswhere in Wikipedia, the "best" known heat-resistant ceramics lose stability around 3,000°C.

This Tech Radar article http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/10-m... claims a more modest 2500°, achieved with a blowtorch and not a laser. What are we to believe?

As a (hypothetical) egghead, I would certainly object on moral grounds to using an egg for a scientific test of heat resistance. I would instead strive to measure the two characteristics actually relevant to heat resistance, namely thermal conductivity and thermally induced ablation.

As an amateur scientist completely unprepared for such a test and working out of an ordinary household, I would have urged the inventor to use his amazing compound to coat not a chicken's egg but the tip of a thermometer. And I would have attacked this assembly not with a laser but with a burning match. And I would have reported on how much of a rise in temperature was observed, and in which time.

Certainly no non-crackpot scientist would subject his or anyone's hand to a blowtorching without considerably more convincing previous tests. But maybe that claim about the human hand was just rhetoric - it's hard to tell.

Later in the supporting article, the claim is toned down to a much more modest 1000°C. Still, there's a fundamental problem here with the basic chemistry:

Plastics, or more formally polymers, are organic compounds, chemically held together by covalent bonds. Because of the physics that underlies chemistry, covalent bonds cannot be as heat-resistant as ionic bonds (as found in salts and other inorganic compounds). All-organic diamond is the hardest substance known to man (I think) but burns at relatively low temperatures. High-temperature plastics break down at around 150°C.

If the compound contained a mix of polymers, as stated, then it contained some organic compounds with known low melting/burning points. Mixing several such compounds doesn't make any of them more heat resistant; their chemical properties (including heat resistance) would not be changed unless you'd created new and different compounds that would then _not_ be polymers. Similarly, mixing in about 10% ceramics might change the compound's mechanical properties, and polymer-ceramic composites are indeed useful materials for this reason, but it doesn't change the fact that part of the mix is low-melting, burning, smoking plastic.

I'm sorely tempted to pick a fight on the Wikipedia Talk page as well, where the most ardent defender of the Starlite story lambastes skeptical commenters as "bigoted" and "ignorant."