Why does adding water to boiling oil cause an explosion but nothing happens when adding oil to boiling water?
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Boiling oil is much hotter than water’s boiling point. Throw water into boiling oil and it instantly vaporises into a cloud of steam. That instant boiling takes the oil with it, like a huge splash, and now you have a cloud of extremely hot oil droplets.
If that oil was actually on fire, then instead of just the surface oil burning slowly you suddenly have millions of tiny droplets burning very fast over a very large volume. This is very bad.
Add cold oil to boiling water and nothing happens because the oil doesn’t boil. You just get hotter oil and maybe cooler water. It’s not the evaporating oil that burns, it’s the violent vaporization of water throwing the oil on the air that causes fires. If you somehow had the water under so much pressure that it was still liquid well above the oil’s flash point (the temperature it combusts) when you dump in the oil, the you might be able to get a similar fireball but at those pressures the oil wouldn’t want to vaporize either, and releasing the pressure would explosively boil the water anyway
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