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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

#31

Post by feoren »

ncmncm wrote: post #22
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,…

> inflation necessarily predates big bang

A tangent, but how can anything pre-date the big bang? Time itself is supposed to have been created at that point. Did you mean inflation necessarily follows a big bang?

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

#32

Post by AnimalMuppet »

feoren wrote: post #31
ncmncm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> inflation necessarily predates big bang A tangent, but how can anything pre -date the big bang? Time itself is supposed to have been created at that point. Did you mean inflation necessarily follows a big bang?

No. There is a (IIUC, recently floated, and non mainstream) theory that inflation did in fact precede the big bang. No, I don't understand how that's possible, or even a meaningful statement.

There was an article on it here on HN, almost certainly within the last month. I don't recall more.

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

#33

Post by watersb »

I did a research paper on water, just a freshman class literature review, and... wow.

Quasicrystals? Ha! At small periods in time and space, I got the (probably mistaken) impression that water could form glass or metal or crystal: order at some scale, disorder at larger scale, the whole complex could itself repeat. Or not.

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

#34

Post by ncmncm »

feoren wrote: post #31
ncmncm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> inflation necessarily predates big bang A tangent, but how can anything pre -date the big bang? Time itself is supposed to have been created at that point. Did you mean inflation necessarily follows a big bang?

"Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore". Ethan Siegel, Starts with a Bang.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851641

I can't tell whether this is just, "Actually having started with the Big Bang implies a singularity, which isn't allowed, so let's assume it wasn't a singularity and take what we get then."

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

#35

Post by amelius »

Also interesting:

https://sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-eart...

> The Earth has lost a quarter of its water

> In its early history, the Earth's oceans contained significantly more water than they do today. A new study indicates that hydrogen from split water molecules has escaped into space.

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

#36

Post by knodi123 »

feoren wrote: post #31
ncmncm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> inflation necessarily predates big bang A tangent, but how can anything pre -date the big bang? Time itself is supposed to have been created at that point. Did you mean inflation necessarily follows a big bang?

> Time itself is supposed to have been created at that point

Our space-time began at the big bang. Even decades ago, Stephen Hawking was talking about it like "Since events before the big bang can have no observational consequences, we might as well leave them out of our discussion and simply say that time began at the big bang."

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

#37

Post by rocqua »

nawgz wrote: post #21
sp332 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

The issue occurs if the new state is inherently lower energy. This is already the case with prions.

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

#39

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

Tsk, no Vonnegutian ice-nine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle

"Festivities for the narrator's presidential inauguration begin, but during an air show performed by San Lorenzo's fighter planes, one of the planes malfunctions and crashes into the seaside palace, causing Monzano's still-frozen body to fall into the sea. Instantly, all the water in the world's seas, rivers, and groundwater transforms into solid ice-nine. The freezing of the world's oceans immediately causes violent tornadoes to ravage the Earth, but the narrator manages to escape with Mona to a secret bunker beneath the palace. When the initial storms subside after several days, they emerge. Exploring the island for survivors, they discover a mass grave where all the surviving San Lorenzans committed suicide by touching ice-nine from the landscape to their mouths on the facetious advice of Bokonon, who has left a note of explanation. Displaying a mix of grief for her people and resigned amusement, Mona promptly follows suit and dies."

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

#40

Post by dennis_jeeves »

dluan wrote: post #27

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 bacter…

>Science moves forward one funeral at a time.

Sometime it also regresses one funeral at a time.

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