Things We Still Don’t Know About Water

Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9700471

Question: Why do some articles get (2014) etc, but articles from months before don't get a designator?

>"Both experiment and calculation seem to indicate that water confined by solid walls to tiny regions of space, whose size is comparable to that of a few hundred molecules, begins to exhibit quantum mechanical effects, including delocalization and quantum coherence."

Sounds like a possible source of random entropy for crypto :-) I did the Wolfram Alpha query[1] and it turns out that 100 molecules of water has a volume of 2.992 yL (yoctoliters, 10^-24 L). I didn't think we were up to yocto-technology yet! The paper that seems to describe this is called "Evidence of a new quantum state of nano-confined water"[2] so I have a feeling that "a few hundred molecules" may be a few orders of magnitude out.

From the paper:

"We find that in water confined on scales of 20˚A, this wave function responds to the details of the confinement, corresponds to a strongly anharmonic local potential, shows evidence in some cases of coherent delocalization in double wells, and involves changes in zero point kinetic energy of the protons from -40 to +120 meV difference from that of bulk water at room temperature. This behavior appears to be a generic feature of nanoscale confinement."

It's a really interesting paper. (although I had to do a lot of Wikipedia searches on certain terminology!)

[1]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+100+molecules...

[2]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4994

Fascinating. I learn something new every time I read a Nautilus piece.

I think the comments in TFA have been Time Cubed.

Richard Feynman said in his interviews that we don't know why water expands when it freezes. On a physics level, it's still a mystery?

and also according to homeopathy, water has memory and magic healing powers http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/