You get carbonic acid when carbonating water and some people like that taste, for some reason 🤷♂️
It’s crazy tho how I was thinking similarly after posting the previous comment. If cabonated water gets the bitterness from carbonic acid, what would hydrogenated or nitrogenated water taste like? I’ve had Guiness and Pepsi Nitro. Both are made bubbly with nitrogen. And while the beer is good, the Pepsi just tasted like normal Pepsi, but like you had left it unsealed overnight.
Never had anything that was artificially hydrogenated, though. 🤔
Carbonic acid is a weak acid, so the acidity isn’t as strong. Most the protons are bound in carbonic acid. Whereas in dissolved hydrogen, all the hydrogen molecules are necessarily ionized, giving what should be an acid quite some orders stronger.
Chemistry teacher here. No way do those hydrogen molecules ionize. If they ionize, that would require making the entire solution positively charged, or filled with singlet hydrogen. Just like dissolving oxygen or nitrogen in water, the gas will dissolve, but not dissociate.
Chemistry teacher here! Hydrogen would only acidify it if it dissociated. Much like how you can dissolve oxygen or nitrogen gas into water, any gas can be dissolved into water. They don’t break apart, they just float as molecules inside the water. It’s just like when sugar dissolves. Salt breaks apart, because it’s ionic. Sugar, most organics, and diatomic gases like H2, N2, and O2 don’t have enough affinity with the water molecules to dissociate (or, at least, not sufficient to dissociate appreciably)
When you get something gnarly is if you have a molecule containing something that does have stronger affinity with the water. Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Di- and Trioxide, Nitrogen Oxides, and other oxygen-bearing covalent gases react with water because the central atoms attract the oxygen in the H2O, while the oxygens surrounding them have partial negative charges from the unpaired electrons, attracting the hydrogens in the water. This causes the water to be ripped apart, creates oxyanions such as CO32-, SO32-, SO42-, NO2-, or NO3-, and leaves protons in the water from the now-dissociated Hydrogens (except for weak acids such as Carbonic Acid, which only partly dissociate from the hydrogen, such that all intermediate species are actually in equilibrium: H2CO3, HCO3-, CO32-, and CO2). Same goes for elemental Chlorine, Fluorine and Bromine. All of these rip the water apart and create the hypo- oxyacid and the hydroacid of the specie (e.g. Cl2 + H2O --> HClO + HCl)
What if we leave out the electrons, and just add hydrogen ions, aka good old naked protons? Might be tricky mixing them in before they pull free electrons from wherever, but if they’re high enough energy we’re fast enough…
No, hydrogen (gas) doesn’t spontaneously dissociate into H+ when dissolved in water because it’s covalently bonded; it remains H2, just like nitrogen remains N2 when dissolved in water. Acidity is a measure of the concentration* of H+, so dissolving H2 doesn’t impact the acidity.
pH is the negative of the (base 10) logarithm of the activity of H+: pH = -log10(aH+)
If you mean “what’s the difference between concentration and activity,” activity is the “effective concentration” of a species. For ideal solutions, activity is equal to concentration. For real solutions, interactions between the components in the solution may cause a species to “act” like it is more or less concentrated.
Dilute solutions at standard conditions are close to ideal: activity is about equal to concentration. But consider a concentrated solution of a salt: the activity will tend to be lower than the concentration because the cations and anions are not completely independent as in an ideal solution, but tend to “shield” each other due to electrostatic forces.
Turns out solubility of hydrogen is quite low (to be expected) so it’s unlikely enough hydrogen would dissolve to burn a hole in a tongue. You’d really have to want to do it, in which case there are easier ways to do so than pressurised supercritical hydrogen.
Dissolved hydrogen is effectively acidifying it, no? That would be chugging fizzing acid. Must’ve been fun.
You get carbonic acid when carbonating water and some people like that taste, for some reason 🤷♂️
It’s crazy tho how I was thinking similarly after posting the previous comment. If cabonated water gets the bitterness from carbonic acid, what would hydrogenated or nitrogenated water taste like? I’ve had Guiness and Pepsi Nitro. Both are made bubbly with nitrogen. And while the beer is good, the Pepsi just tasted like normal Pepsi, but like you had left it unsealed overnight.
Never had anything that was artificially hydrogenated, though. 🤔
I’m one of those people but I couldn’t tell you why either. I just like sour, I guess.
Carbonic acid is a weak acid, so the acidity isn’t as strong. Most the protons are bound in carbonic acid. Whereas in dissolved hydrogen, all the hydrogen molecules are necessarily ionized, giving what should be an acid quite some orders stronger.
Chemistry teacher here. No way do those hydrogen molecules ionize. If they ionize, that would require making the entire solution positively charged, or filled with singlet hydrogen. Just like dissolving oxygen or nitrogen in water, the gas will dissolve, but not dissociate.
(See my reply above for full details)
Chemistry teacher here! Hydrogen would only acidify it if it dissociated. Much like how you can dissolve oxygen or nitrogen gas into water, any gas can be dissolved into water. They don’t break apart, they just float as molecules inside the water. It’s just like when sugar dissolves. Salt breaks apart, because it’s ionic. Sugar, most organics, and diatomic gases like H2, N2, and O2 don’t have enough affinity with the water molecules to dissociate (or, at least, not sufficient to dissociate appreciably)
When you get something gnarly is if you have a molecule containing something that does have stronger affinity with the water. Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Di- and Trioxide, Nitrogen Oxides, and other oxygen-bearing covalent gases react with water because the central atoms attract the oxygen in the H2O, while the oxygens surrounding them have partial negative charges from the unpaired electrons, attracting the hydrogens in the water. This causes the water to be ripped apart, creates oxyanions such as CO32-, SO32-, SO42-, NO2-, or NO3-, and leaves protons in the water from the now-dissociated Hydrogens (except for weak acids such as Carbonic Acid, which only partly dissociate from the hydrogen, such that all intermediate species are actually in equilibrium: H2CO3, HCO3-, CO32-, and CO2). Same goes for elemental Chlorine, Fluorine and Bromine. All of these rip the water apart and create the hypo- oxyacid and the hydroacid of the specie (e.g. Cl2 + H2O --> HClO + HCl)
What if we leave out the electrons, and just add hydrogen ions, aka good old naked protons? Might be tricky mixing them in before they pull free electrons from wherever, but if
they’re high enough energywe’re fast enough…No, hydrogen (gas) doesn’t spontaneously dissociate into H+ when dissolved in water because it’s covalently bonded; it remains H2, just like nitrogen remains N2 when dissolved in water. Acidity is a measure of the concentration* of H+, so dissolving H2 doesn’t impact the acidity.
*actually the activity
Thanks, I never understood - what’s the practical difference between pH and activity?
pH is the negative of the (base 10) logarithm of the activity of H+: pH = -log10(aH+)
If you mean “what’s the difference between concentration and activity,” activity is the “effective concentration” of a species. For ideal solutions, activity is equal to concentration. For real solutions, interactions between the components in the solution may cause a species to “act” like it is more or less concentrated.
Dilute solutions at standard conditions are close to ideal: activity is about equal to concentration. But consider a concentrated solution of a salt: the activity will tend to be lower than the concentration because the cations and anions are not completely independent as in an ideal solution, but tend to “shield” each other due to electrostatic forces.
How do we then calculate the activity of concentrated or non-ideal systems?
Most soda has a pH of like 3, so probably can’t be muchh worse.
Turns out solubility of hydrogen is quite low (to be expected) so it’s unlikely enough hydrogen would dissolve to burn a hole in a tongue. You’d really have to want to do it, in which case there are easier ways to do so than pressurised supercritical hydrogen.