Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Five things we still don’t know about water

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 108 posts

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

#41

Post by XorNot »

knodi123 wrote: post #36
feoren wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

No observational consequences means t=0 is zero though - if no events from before then can have carried through consequences, then they might as well have not happened - certainly no information about them can ever be recovered.

You are making a very strong assertion that something did carry through - what are you basing that on?

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

#42

Post by nawgz »

rocqua wrote: post #37
nawgz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not under the impression folding proteins is a state-change, and it's also unclear to me if it is a chemical reaction, so I do not think I understand the relevance of this point. I specifically stated the parameters.

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

#43

Post by dumbfoundded »

erehweb wrote: post #12
Hokusai wrote: post #5

So we may still find some day ice-nine like the one found in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Or do we know that it's impossible?

There's an anecdote that Vonnegut was talking to a scientist at a party and explained the idea for Ice-9. The scientist went pale and sat in a corner for a couple of hours staring into space in deep thought, after which he stood up with a smile and said "No, it's impossible".

Maybe it's time for a strange matter hypothesis sequel

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

#44

Post by chaps »

XorNot wrote: post #41
knodi123 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

No observational consequences means t=0 is zero though - if no events from before then can have carried through consequences, then they might as well have not happened - certainly no information about them can ever be recovered. You are making a very strong assertion that something did carry through - what are you basing that on?

You're also making a pretty big claim about whether a universe makes noise if no dimension is around to articulate it.

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

#45

Post by akomtu »

What I've never understood is how the atomic nuclei has such influence on macroscopic chemical properties. The only useful property of the nuclei is its charge - an integer number, so all macroscopic effects should be completely defined by that integer alone, and all properties of water are sufficiently described by just three numbers - 1, 8, 1 (in any order).

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

#46

Post by anitil »

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…

Because I had to look it up :

> 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier was a promoter of the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created in, and thereafter escaped from a laboratory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier

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

#47

Post by sp332 »

nawgz wrote: post #42
rocqua wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am not under the impression folding proteins is a state-change, and it's also unclear to me if it is a chemical reaction, so I do not think I understand the relevance of this point. I specifically stated the parameters.

It's not a chemical change. Neither is ice forming from water.

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

#48

Post by gsich »

anitil wrote: post #46
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…

Because I had to look it up : > 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) > During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier was a promoter of the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created in, and thereafter escaped from a laboratory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier

Considering the Chinese response to that: Not unlikely.

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

#50

Post by nawgz »

sp332 wrote: post #47
nawgz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not under the impression folding proteins is a state-change, and it's also unclear to me if it is a chemical reaction, so I do not think I understand the relevance of this point. I specifically stated the parameters.

It's not a chemical change. Neither is ice forming from water.

Yes, clearly ice water is a state change and not chemical, but my point is mostly that prions / protein folding is neither a state-change nor a chemical change, so I don't see how it's relevant to the posited scenario.
Post reply on HN