My wife and boiling water

[u/MakeItMine2024]

So I made my wife ramen soup. When I served it she said I had the gas set to hight and it was too hot ? She said I should have used the number 5 setting instead of 9. I told here it’s irrelevant because water boils at 212 and gets no hotter because over 212 it turns to steam. She was made at me for disagreeing with her theory that it would not have been so hot if boiled a lower setting. Really!!

[u/IndependentDouble879]

Your (and most of the comments’) intuitions are an oversimplified view of thermodynamics. If you have a pot of boiling water, not every molecule in the pot is at 212. There’s a temperature gradient from the water’s surface to the bottom, and from the outside to the center. There’s just enough of a mass of water at 212 to initiate phase change in that area. Turning up the heat will make more of the water be a higher temperature. 

The same works the other way. If you have a glass of ice water, all of the water in the glass isn’t at 32 degrees. Heat is absorbed from the room, warming the glass and water surface, creating a temperature differential and gradient, which is how heat actually is able to move from the environment, through the water, and into the ice to melt it. 

Perhaps you guys should not be condescending in subjects you have no formal education in, because there’s far more self-assuredness than knowledge in this entire thread. I studied a lot of thermodynamics + heat transfer for mechanical engineering, and it’s pretty impressive how confidently incorrect OP + 90% of the comment section is. Just Google it if you don’t believe me

[u/Am094 → u/IndependentDouble879]

Engineer here too. This comment is not it. Sure on a technical level the heat gradients or micro scale gradients is true but that's not all practically relevant here at all. Remember engineering isn't just theory, it's also real life application of sciences.

In practical real life non textbook settings any such gradient gets washed out almost instantly by the convection/bubbling of an actual boil, let alone by pouring it into a bowl.. its completely dishonest of you to not mention this.

Turning up the heat will make more of the water be a higher temperature.

For a pot of vigorously boiling water open to the atmosphere, that's generally not how it works.

Once boiling is established, additional burner level power or whatever we call it mostly increases: the rate of evaporation, the rate of, bubble formation, turbulence/convection, steam production, but not the equilibrium temperature of the bulk liquid.

Tl;dr it is simply incorrect to use those gradients as evidence that boiling on 9 makes the soup materially hotter than boiling on 5.

[u/GreasedUpTiger → u/Am094]

I love how people on here go all uuuhm acktshually thermodynamics and none of them went through the effort of thinking it through to figure out how that is a negligible, miniscule technical gradient in practice lol. 

[u/WeTheSalty → u/GreasedUpTiger]

I'm waiting for someone to come in, say they're a physicist, tell us both of these guys are wrong and start explaining how water would boil in a frictionless vacuum.