Ecnerwal wrote:

The reason is a bit less obvious than that, as demonstrated in
high-school chemistry to make the point. At least back when I went to
high school it was - with all the skittishness about exposing young
persons to the faintest shred of real life, it's no doubt no longer in
vogue, regardless of proper safety precautions.

When you add water to acid, the water can be heated to boiling - I
forget the details of why, but I remember the effect. Effectively, you
can consider acid dilution to be an exothermic "reaction." The heat is
there in either direction, but the distribution of heat is significantly
different with acid to water .vs. water to acid. When water is added to
acid and the water flashes to steam, you get acid being flung out of the
container by the steam - not good.

Chemistry students who retained more are welcome to fill in the details,
or the web probably can as well. I don't need them, I recall the effect
and that's plenty for me.

Interesting. I never took chemistry but my biology teacher did drop a
small ball of sodium in water once. That was fun.

Makes all the more sense; the likely hood of it splashing/spilling is
much more likely if it tends to explode on you!

....Kevin
--
Kevin Miller
Juneau, Alaska

http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
In a recent poll, seven out of ten hard drives preferred Linux.