I saw this video that says water “expands into” steam and that 1 cup of water can expand into as much as 1600 cups of steam.
But like… Why specifically 1600? Is steam a gas? If it’s a gas it can basically occupy any volume however large, right? The molecules will just go far apart from each other “forever”, no?
This led to a series of increasingly existential questions….
(1) Is steam not a gas? It does look a little like water when it rises from my kettle.
(2) Do different liquids “expand into” different volumes of their gaseous substances?
And more exestentially…
(3) What does the “volume” of a gas even mean if it can expand basically infinitely to “fill any container” as I was taught in school?
This is the YouTube video here: https://youtu.be/-8lXXg8dWHk
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>1 cup of water can expand into as much as 1600 cups of steam.
*At standard pressure
That’s always the bit that’s missing here
If you boil water in near vacuum then the steam will take up significantly more than 1600 cups of volume but the pressure will be significantly lower
Similarly, if you boil water in a power plant and don’t let the steam expand then you can get steam as dense as liquid water but it’s under much higher pressure than normal
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