Edit: wow okay, I did not expect to wake up to THIS. Of course my most popular post would be a dumb stoner question.
Thankyou so much for the awards and the answers, I can sleep a little easier now
In: Chemistry
You know how you can’t just blow air on wood and it will start a fire? You need to light it to start a fire.
In chemistry, there’s this concept called activation energy. In order for chemicals to react, they need to overcome this energy barrier in order to reach the new state, and this is typically done with heat. And in some cases with electricity (since what holds molecules together are electrons and electricity is using an electric potential to move electrons, we can induce a chemical reaction through an electric potential alone).
So you need to smosh hydrogen and oxygen together hard enough in order to make water. And the key word is hard enough. If you place hydrogen and oxygen molecules together without the activation energy, it won’t react.
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