Why does adding water to boiling oil cause an explosion but nothing happens when adding oil to boiling water?
In: 200
1. Hot oil is simply way hotter than boiling water.
2. Water is denser than oil, so it sinks.
For a pot of boiling water, it is at its **maximum** temperature and literally no hotter temp exists for it (it has to transform into steam and leave the pot to get hotter). From the perspective of oil, boiling water is just fairly hot. The oil will float on top and you just have oily boiling water.
For a pot of hot oil, it could get very hot, far beyond the boiling point of water. If you pour water into really hot oil, well, from the perspective of water, the temperature is hotter than is physically possible, and it will turn into steam. This *might* have been kinda safe if the water was able to float on top of the water, but it doesn’t: the water both *sinks* and *explodes into steam* at the *same time*.
For reference, when measured in Celcius, water is liquid from 0C to 100C. Under 0 it freezes, over 0 it boils into steam. Hot oil can maybe get as hot as 200C if it is around its smoke point. It would be inaccurate to call that ‘twice as hot as boiling water’, but it is ‘twice the difference in temperature between frozen water and steam’. (You usually wouldn’t cook with a bot of oil at smoking point, but the point remains that you can go hotter than 100C.)
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