I Should Come Up with a Better Title than This But Who Are We Kidding Here?
Many moons ago, I left the comment below on this post.
In your second paragraph, you have the explanation reversed. A normal fire would feed on oxygen. This new fire feeds on carbon dioxide.
And, that leads to a second question, if it feeds on carbon dioxide, why would water cause it to grow? Water is dihydrogen monoxide. No carbon in water, just two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
Carbon dioxide is one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms.
So, if this new fire were to need carbon dioxide as opposed to oxygen, then it would need the carbon. Since dihydrogen monoxide does not have carbon, it should not be able to feed the fire and cause it to grow.
A more likely explanation would be if the water itself were to become the oxidizing agent. A fire is a rapid chemical reaction involving an exchange of oxygen. Normally, water would not be an oxidizing agent, because it is relatively stable compared to other compounds. But, with the elemental form of sodium (i.e., “raw” sodium), water (air, too) can serve as the oxidizing agent. Sodium has to be stored in an oxygen free environment, and that includes a moisture free environment, because NaOH is a stronger molecular bond and attraction than H2O. So, when elemental sodium (Na) is exposed to water (H2O), the water molecule will split, with the oxygen atom and on hydrogen atom combining with a sodium atom to form sodium hydroxide (lye) and leaving the remaining hydrogen atom on its own to form hydrogen gas.
So, possibly, you could have used a sodium-based fire, where spraying the fire with water only increased the fire. But, then you would have to explain how the fire maintained its source of sodium.
I repeat that here because that’s good stuff and, with the way blogs tend to disappear sometimes, I figured I best keep a copy of my comment. Which also reminds me I’ve also posted some good stuff on JD’s blog…
Anyway, so why is that important? Well, that comment led to this post, “Are You Salt or Sodium?“, which is one of my better posts around here from back in the day when I actually wrote stuff here that was mildly useful.
Then, that post was followed up later by “Explode Like Sodium, Flow Like Water“, which is another decent post from back in the day when I actually wrote stuff that was somewhat inspirational and stuff and where I didn’t always copy and rewrite (or not even bother to rewrite) a sentence from the preceding paragraph like I just did here. Rewritten, in case you didn’t notice because you weren’t paying attention the first time around.
If you haven’t read those posts in a while, you should definitely read them now. For one thing, that’s some good stuff there. For another thing, this is all you’re getting today because this post ends right, um, here.
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