Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

My now-husband, boyfriend at the time, bought my parents, who are big pizza geeks, a pizza knife for Christmas one year. I'm not talking about a little wheel-type cutter, but a giant, probably 12" or so long, mezza-luna style knife. They still love it and talk about what a great gift it was. Such a knife does take up a lot of space (my parents have a magnet style hanger just for the one knife) and is a bit of a unitasker, but there is something very impressive and efficient about cutting your pizza all the way across in one fell swoop.

I love it on white bread toasted in the toaster oven (the whole sandwich) so it gets melty, kind of like a grilled cheese.

Great post, and I think you did a wonderful job of summarizing heat transfer and temperature.

But, I think you're dismissing Bill Woods' concerns too easily. From a point source energy decays as inverse square since that's how the cross sectional area decays. On the other hand, if there is an infinite flat surface, the energy doesn't decay at all with distance. An oven may be somewhere in between, but it's not at all obvious a priori that the energy decay will even be sub-linear in this case.

I suspect that the dominant effect both when the pizza stone is close to the top or the bottom is the air currents -- putting the pizza stone on the bottom of the oven speeds up the air underneath the pizza stone (and therefore convection to the stone) in the same way that putting it on time speeds up convection to the top of the pizza.

I love bacon because it's delicious by itself, and it makes everything else better!