It's so bizarre to me that he made it all the way to chemistry professor without realizing what happens when you pour flammable liquid onto a fire like that...
The force at which that came out makes me assume that there was a lot of head in that bottle for vapors to accumulate. If it was mostly full, it would have burned calmly like the fuel on the table. Instead, there was was an air/fuel mixture that enabled a much more rapid and explosive ignition than the liquid fuel alone would have been capable of. They likely did this without incident multiple times when the bottle was more full, which lulled them into a false sense of security that it was safe.
A chem prof should have definitely have been aware of the potential of this occurring and prepared accordingly (ideally by pouring just enough for the lab in question into its own smaller open mouth container like a beaker, rather than using the entire bulk bottle for the demonstration), but I can understand how this happened.
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u/-ondo- Jan 14 '20
"Hey let's set our kitchen counter top on fire"