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Five things we still don’t know about water

nautil.us

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Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#21

Post by nawgz »

sp332 wrote: post #14
nawgz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would seem to me some laws of thermodynamics would prevent any such "infection"-style reaction, but I am not a physicist nor chemist.

Supercooled water shows this kind of reaction with normal ice.

Right, but that "supercooled water" can only make such a reaction because, thermodynamically speaking, someone intentionally injected energy into it without changing its state, thus enabling the reaction to occur within the bounds of the energy delta created, and ending when that ends.

I do not see how a molecule could be stable in some condition, and then when making contact with something else, result in nothing other than a cascading state-change of that other. It doesn't make sense.

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#22

Post by ncmncm »

bartvk wrote: post #2

Pretty cool article. The five described points are: 1) the kinds of ice 2) phase transition between two liquid forms of water 3) three unclear points about evaporation 4) the pH value of the surface of waterfalls and 5) quantum mechanical effects of nanoconfined water. Highly worth reading, and it's a pretty easy read, too.

I love articles like this.

Different branches of science have different relationships with their unknowns. Cosmologists will forever revile anybody who mentions something they don't know, if it conflicts with something they like to think they do know. But biologists are always eager to talk about things nobody knows about biology.

The public would be much better served by carefully curated lists of what doesn't fit, illustrating the boundaries of understanding, than by overconfident descriptions of (e.g.) the first .001 seconds of the universe's existence.

I just found out that inflation necessarily predates big bang, but nobody can guess by how much.

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#27

Post by dluan »

Most biological perspectives think that water behaves a certain way, which is like bulk water, when in fact at certain scales it behaves very differently, especially at interfaces and surfaces. For example, it's possible to draw flow across a charged surface where you can use it to effectively purify or separate water from things floating in it. This is useful when trying to filter out baddies like viruses and bacteria.

I was working in a research lab that was trying to do work re-examining these fundamental assumptions in a bioengineering context, but it often was difficult to not get dismissed by the academic establishment and put in the looney bucket, especially when Luc Montagnier left such a sour taste in a lot of peoples minds. Oh well. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.

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