You can use platinum as the catalyst. I sw a good film of this once – a jet of hydrogen was played across a platinum mesh. The hydrogen attaches itself to the platinum, then combines with ambient oxygen to create water.
The platinum mesh gets awfully hot while this is going on, though.
I’ve also seen a film with a container of hydrogen and oxygen gas being shocked by (?) a Tesla coil, and water resulting.
I KNEW that :smack: I KNEW that :smack: I KNEW THAT! :smack:
Hey, that’s an exact number. It’s ten times more than 0.1 Zillion. 
Maybe I should have titled the thread “Could I make water this way” but the discussion has been, as usual, both entertaining and informative.
But briefly, hydrogen and oxygen in the proper 2 to 1 ratio, won’t just combine to make water, there has to be some kind of catalyst. Correct?
See? That’s the beauty of it. You’ll blow up AND get a glass of Evian.
Two for the price of one. Whatta bargain.
Briefly, Yes – though heat (i.e. a match or flame) works, too.
Slightly less briefly, they will combine without a catalyst, just verrry slooowwwwly. Too slowly to notice, until you get things moving with heat or some platinum, etc.
I’ll point out that while this process CAN work. as many people have pointed out, it isn’t practical for mass production out of water because hydrogen gas is in short supply around our neck of the woods. (ie the planet earth.)
As I understand it, hydrogen is extracted mostly either from water (the reverse of the process under discussion - electrolytic seperation of water molecules, which requires a lot of energy,) or from fossil fuels, which we all know are pretty pricey and getting slowly harder to come by.
You need a catalyst if you want the reaction to proceed reasonably fast at room temperature. This is because a catalyst lowers the activation energy necessary to get the reaction going.
Alternatively, you could simply raise the temperature. A match will do this nicely. Since the combustion of hydrogen in the presence of oxygen is exothermic, the heat produced by the reaction will make the continued reaction self-sustaining until you run out of one of the reactants.
We’re going to need a bigger blender.
No, there doesn’t have to be a catalyst. You can just set the hydrogen on fire. A match ain’t a catalyst, it’s just a bit of heat to start the reaction.
However, as stated above, you can use a catalyst to perform the process. Platinum or (if I recall correctly) palladium mesh will do it, even at normal temperatures. But a great deal of heat will still be produced, because water has less energy and less entropy than gaseous hydrogen and oxygen.
BTW, forgot to mention that 2 zillion molecules of hydrogen and 1 zillion molecules of oxygen make 2 zillion molecules of water. Hydrogen and oxygen are H2 and 02, respectively, in their gas forms, fool!
2(H2) + (O2) --> 2(H20)
um…ya, but…ya,but…ummmmmm,ya but wait a minute.
2 zillion ATOMs of hydrogen is actually 1 zillion molecules of 2(H2)? And 1 zillion ATOMS of oxygen is actually 0.5 zillion molecules of O2? And combined, we get water that’s actually 2(H2O)?
Way TMI
Now, if I could just add a lit match and get BEER 
Sure, you could do that, but in order to put bubbles in it, you’ll need to split a beer atom.
Now, where’s that chisel?
Hate to quibble, but isn’t that a beer molecule? And, if you split it, you get LITE beer! :eek:
I think you need to fuse beer molecules to get decent beer 
The coefficients in front of the formulas for molecular oxygen (O[sub]2[/sub]), molecular hydrogen (H[sub]2[/sub]), and water (H[sub]2[/sub]O) are not part of the formulas. They simply indicate that two hydrogen molecules must react with one oxygen molecule to get two water molecules.
Getting fancy with my coding, the balanced chemical equation for this is:
2H[sub]2[/sub] (g) + O[sub]2[/sub] (g) ----> 2H[sub]2[/sub]O (g)
Not true! Ever since the discovery of atom number 133, Brewskium, which has a half-life of about 45 minutes until you need to pee it out…
What would the cost of such an operation be, in samoleons?
OK, so THAT’S where lite beer comes from. It’s a half-life :eek:
I never thought I’d live to see the day a Young Einstein reference was made on the SDMB.
Do I hear a seal opening?
ROTFL! Thank you for the laugh. What a thread, Young Einstein and that one, which, for the life of me, I can’t quite place. (Young Frankenstein?) Absolute brilliance!
Isn’t is a play on “we’re going to need a bigger boat” from Jaws?