what is the most powerful acid, and how come the acid does not burn through the glass or plastic bottle it comes in?
Hydroflouric acid does dissolve glass. I don’t know whether it has the lowest pH of any acid though.
IIRC from hs chem, most acids work on metal but some will etch glass. Acids also have to be in solution with water to work. This is why there is a rule to add acid to water but never add water to acid. If you pour acid into water you make a weak solution of acid that gradually gets stronger. If you add water to acid you immediately have a ultra strong concentration which will begin reacting with some acids. Best to be avoided if you want to keep your skin and flesh on your bones.
“The goggles! They do nothing!” Always a way to work in a Simpsons quote.
The highest normality, iirc, is Phosphoric acid while the highest molarity if hydrofluoric acid. A lot depends on what you want to dissolve in it. HF is great for glass but won’t dissolve gold. You’d need aqua regia, a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid(1:4 ration, btw) to dissolve gold or platinum.
As far as nastiness to humans, I’d go with HF. It’s caustic, but burns inner tissues more than the skin. It’s a poison. It readily attacks calcium, which allows it to destroy one’s bones.
Actually that’s because adding water to acid will cause the small amount of water to boil as it reacts with the water. The splatter can be bad. Even with the goggles. 
pH depends on the concentration of the acid, but the current record holder for inherently strongest acid is (I believe) the superacid fluoroantimonic acid. That would be a mixture of antimony pentafluoride and hydrofluoric acid. What happens is that when HF dissociates, its conjugate base (F-) gets soaked up by the antimony pentafluoride, producing a very non-reactive substance. This allows for a very high concentration of hydrogen ion to build up.
Getting the jump on superacids
According to a friend of mine who worked with superacid catalysts, they were never shipped in ‘complete’ form. You mixed it on the spot, and you better use all of it, because it will melt straight through any container you give it, given enough time.
Well, I guess the question of “most powerful” has been answered. One thing I didn’t notice, however, was a good explaination of why it’s the most powerful.
You see, every fluid in the world has a pH. This is a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in the solution. The lower the pH, the more hydrogen ions there are, and the more acidic a solution is. In contrast, only a few hydrogen ions will make a pH very high, and result in an alkaline, or basic, solution. Here’s a good reference to different pH’s of various fuids.
One thing to note is that it is a logarithmic scale, so that a decrease in one pH means the concentration has ten times as much hydrogen ion concentration as before. So while you may look at it and think,
“Wow, lemon juice is only two less than the most powerful acid ever!”, well, yes, 2 pH, but that is equal to about 100 times less concentration.
And as to why they don’t destroy the container they are in, it’s because different acids react with differnt materials differently. I could ask you why that milk doesn’t disentegrate the milk jig. Simple: milk doesn’t react with plastic, and, aside from very powerful acids that are mixed on the spot, most acids have at least one material they won’t react with and can be stored in, and for a lot of them, it’s glass (well, there very well might be many more materials, but glass is the best to use, because it’s cheap.)
(Oh, and anymore with more chemistry knowledge than me, please feel free to correct me. I’m going on a year of HS chemistry several years ago, and two semesters of college chemistry a few years ago.)
Dammit, you beat me to the LSD joke. Shmock Hock d’Pop!
Great minds, Argent!
Could significant amounts of these super acids be made? And would you be able to get the sort of effect shown in the Alien movie using them to disolve through a ship’s hull. Nasty question, but could this stuff be weaponisable to defeat tank armour?
Criminy, didn’t one cremember on the Nostromo think to get a box of baking soda. :smack:
Cleans teeth, freshens your refigerator, neutralizes corrosive alien drool!
HF is nasty stuff to get on you. It will penetrate your skin and work its way towards the bone. This is apparently something you want to avoid very seriously. A friend of mine was using HF to clean some crucibles (HF is used in the glass and crystal business to clean glass and other materials out of things like platinum crucibles) and got some on his finger. They ended up cutting chunks out of his finger.
Really strong acids, I’ve been told, get very thick and syrupy, and don’t work as fast as the stuff in the Aliens movies. Those beasties would have very thick blood! Also, if you dilute with water or neutralize with a base, you’re going to generate a lot of heat. I’ve always thought that a bullet like a tranquilizer dart full of concentrated lye would make an Alien discorporate in interesting ways.
What are the normal safety measures for handling HF acid? I’m thinking the butyl gloves i get at Harbor Freight for mixing mortar aren’t going to cut it.
Artistic license. A flamethrower is much more photogenic than a Drain-O gun.
I hear tell that really strong alkalis are equally fun, as they saponificate your body fat. That means they make into soap. While it’s still on you. And carry on reacting with the fat nice and deep. :eek:
Incidentally, hydrochloric acid, despite being very strong (in the sense of pH) is not particularly dangerous or corrosive to human flesh. If you spill some on you, you’ll want to wash it off, but you should walk, not run, to the sink. At worst, you’ll get a slightly itchy rash from it. It will enthusiastically attack most metals, though.
And kidchameleon, I had always heard that Aqua Regia was a mixture of nitric and sulfuric, not hydrochloric.
I was told in college chemistry that pure Hydrogen Peroxide is the strongest, by definition (the kind in stores is only 1%, I think). My chemistry is rusty now, so don’t ask me to explain.
I recently filled a battery with the supplied acid (lawn tractor battery). There were numerous warnings, which i generally followed. A few drops of acid flicked onto my jeans. When I later removed the jeans from the wash, there were four holes where the droplets had struck. Guess the safety goggles were a good idea.
Sorry to continue the hijack, but IIRC didn’t Dallas say something about the Alien’s blood being “molecular acid?” Is that for real, or is it sci-fi technobabble?
And does all this mean the reason why the acidity of the Alien blood was so variable in *Aliens * was because some had gotten into the colony’s food stores and pigged out on the Arm & Hammer? 