chemistry
Explanation
The Joke
A child in a lab coat and safety goggles reads instructions from a chemistry set: "By adding water to an equal mass of aqueous solution of H2O, you cause the water to double in volume." The caption reads: "At last, chemistry sets are perfectly safe."
The Humor
The comic satirizes the trend of making children's chemistry sets increasingly safe and sanitized over the decades. Older chemistry sets famously included genuinely dangerous chemicals that could produce real reactions (and real accidents). Modern sets have been progressively neutered for liability reasons. The joke pushes this to its absurd logical endpoint: a chemistry set where the only "experiment" is adding water to water. An "aqueous solution of H2O" is just a needlessly technical way of saying "water" — H2O is already water, and "aqueous" means dissolved in water. So the instruction is literally "add water to water and you'll have more water." The humor comes from the contrast between the child's full lab regalia (coat, goggles) and the complete absence of any actual chemistry being performed.
References
- Chemistry sets: Once a popular children's toy containing real chemicals for home experiments. Over the decades, concerns about safety and liability led manufacturers to remove increasingly more chemicals, leading to complaints that modern sets are too boring to inspire real interest in science.
- H2O: The chemical formula for water. An "aqueous solution of H2O" is a redundant tautology — it literally means "water dissolved in water," which is just water.