Craniums and Crayons

My dad used to design kitchens at Lowe’s and one day he got a dude from one of the national labs looking to buy a countertop. Dad sent him home with a sample of a quartz-composite countertop to make sure the color will look good with his existing cabinets. The dude asks my dad what the composition of the countertop is and whether it’ll melt if he puts a pot on it (since it’s a composite and not pure stone) and Dad gives him some rough numbers and reassures him that it won’t melt if he puts a hot pan on the counter. The dude comes back with week later without the sample. The dude gives dad a detailed list of the countertops composition, to the nearest hundredth of a percentile, and the exact temperature it melts at, because he took it to his lab and melted it down. tldr, it’s not just firefighters.

Imagine giving someone a sample of the granite you use to make countertops and they come back a few days later just to tell you they fucking dematerialized it

Ok, but this is just, like, what people do if they have access to equipment. We just… put shit in it. Just to see. At this point, I’ll try and hit just about anything with an arc, just to see. I’ll sand and polish anything you’ll let me, if I’m bored enough. If I had a machine that could melt something down and tell me exactly what was in it? I’d be just waiting for parts of my world to become “trash” so I could de-materialize it and turn it into knowledge of what it was.