Five things we still don’t know about water
nautil.us
nautil.us
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.
> 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.
Now we know that there were GoF research proposals by the same scientists squashing these ‘conspiracies’. Wups conflict of interest.
It's not because it us "against the norm", it is because the theory itself clearly involves a conspiracy.
No, it's the theory that it is a conspiracy, or more likely, a cover-up. (As I doubt there was a conspiracy to release the virus).
"Conspiracy theory" has a specific negative connotation, and has "specific characteristics ... such as an opposition [to those] who are qualified to evaluate its accuracy." [1]
> A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy
> A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation,[3][4] when other explanations are more probable.[5][6]
And the distinction is clearly drawn.
> A conspiracy theory is not the same as a conspiracy
> In January 2009, Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Laureate virologist who led the team that discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), claimed (in a paper published in a journal that he set up, which seems to have avoided conventional peer review as it was accepted three days after submission) that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses massively diluted in water emit radio waves that he can detect.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory#Other_scientists
Looks like he'd gone that route well before any of the COVID-19 stuff.
Here they show pictures supposedly in support of water structure.
Quite a bit of work in the area.
Not the most ringing endorsement.
There is something about water that tickles the imagination in a way conductive to spiritual/magical thinking. When I read in an Ian Banks novel that Water would form ice under sufficient pressure from gravity regardless of temperature, making hot ice possible....
Highly worth reading, and it's a pretty easy read, too.
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.
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?
There was an article on it here on HN, almost certainly within the last month. I don't recall more.
- Naïve extrapolation of GR backwards in time results in a singularity at a finite point in time. Call that the big bang singularity (at t = 0)
- Using current accepted theory, we're able to simulate what was going on at t > 10^-32 or so. Before this, the implied densities and temperature are beyond what our theories can handle and we're less confident about how we got to that point (with an excess of baryons, smooth distribution of energy and matter, and the other parameters that obtain in our current universe).
- Inflation is one of the favored explanations for what happened before, but it doesn't address its own cause ("what happened before inflation?"). There's a theory of "eternal inflation" (local regions that have stopped inflating surrounded by regions that are still inflating), which explains the fine-tuning problem (each region that has stopped inflating can have its own fine structure etc). This is less accepted, maybe this is what you're thinking of?
- There's a push to redefine "the big bang" as all the stuff we can explain with current physics, i.e. as starting after inflation (but still using t=0 at the big bang singularity everyone's pretty sure doesn't actually exist). Or maybe it's been like that for a while and it's just pop science that perpetuates the big bang = singularity idea. Like how relativistic mass has fallen out of favor as a concept.
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."
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."
You are making a very strong assertion that something did carry through - what are you basing that on?
"Might as well not" is different from "Did not". That's all I, and Mr Hawking, are saying. In fact, your first sentence is literally just a paraphrase of my quote from Hawking.
> You are making a very strong assertion that something did carry through
No, I most certainly did not.
All I said is, there could have been something, or could have not been. I did not say something did happen prior to the big bang, just that it is wrong to say that it could not have.
There are people working to disprove this. There is a concept floating around that the CMB might contain evidence of something from before the BB. If our universe came into existence within some other universe, then arrangements of large gravitational objects in that universe may have some impact on the early formation of our 'pocket' universe.
You could do some extrapolation on the expansion of the universe and just say that yes, there was a point zero, 10^-32 seconds before the earliest point in time that our models can understand, and that's where everything started from a singularity. But then we are still left with a short period of time at the start, where some physics happened that we don't have a working model for.
So since an extrapolated expansion of the universe from a singularity doesn't work in our currently understood models (at least not in the very earliest part of that timeline), is it not then plausible that something other than that expansion from a singularity could have happened during this early unknown period of time?
Ho, M. W. (2014). Large supramolecular water clusters caught on camera-A review. Water, 6, 1-12.
https://www.academia.edu/6280471/Large_supramolecular_water_...
This is around the very controversial question of whether amorphous water can have a structure. Controversy, because homeopathy. Pretty pictures, though!
Or if that doesn't work for some reason just search the term the parent above posted. Was the first results for me.
Rao, M. L., Sedlmayr, S. R., Roy, R., & Kanzius, J. (2010). Polarized microwave and RF radiation effects on the structure and stability of liquid water. Curr. Sci, 98(11), 1500-1504.
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.
I would suspect it's an insignificant amount, except the CO2 isn't, so maybe it's more than I expect.
The space shuttle orbiters also burned hydrogen, but the SRBs burned aluminum. I used to enjoy pointing out the difference in their plumes, which is very clear to see as the orbiter's plume is invisible whereas the SRBs are distinctly orange.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesci...
From the article:
> But the exact mechanism for how water evaporates isn’t completely understood. The evaporation rate is traditionally represented in terms of a rate of collision between molecules, multiplied by a fudge factor called the evaporation coefficient, which varies between zero and one. Experimental determination of this coefficient, spanning several decades, has varied over three orders of magnitude.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation :
> Evaporation is a type of vaporization that occurs on the surface of a liquid as it changes into the gas phase.[1] The surrounding gas must not be saturated with the evaporating substance. When the molecules of the liquid collide, they transfer energy to each other based on how they collide with each other. When a molecule near the surface absorbs enough energy to overcome the vapor pressure, it will escape and enter the surrounding air as a gas.[2] When evaporation occurs, the energy removed from the vaporized liquid will reduce the temperature of the liquid, resulting in evaporative cooling.[3]
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.
But okay, after stating this very interesting mechanism in that form, I see the point being made by others. This catalyst-style mechanism which can induce physical changes in the environment without itself changing could be exploited on scales that would allow one to "maliciously/adversarially" create a chemical / energized substance that would catalyze say a lake or an ocean into freezing / sublimating.
However, I find it impossible to see how such a transition could be found for water though, and it seems to me the nature of the prion & proteins is that the prion requires some level of complexity in the matter it interacts with to cause this energy transition. For more exotic substances than water, or perhaps water which itself holds a large amount of solutes satisfying some characteristic, I could see it.
I appreciate your insight into this matter clarifying the prion mechanism especially. I am also not well educated on these matters so hopefully it doesn't stink too bad :)
Entertaining too!
"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."
short version: the electrons assemble in asymmetric layers, conferring properties to the atoms. Thus the atoms on the same columns having comparable properties by having the same layers occupied by electrons.
and that's the "I flunked the exam" version, I'm sure this level of explanation is ridiculously simplified compared to the real deal ;)
Water molecules are molecules, and therefore have a more complex electronic structure than atoms, and therefore is harder to describe, especially at the extremes.
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.
This one too.
In addition to ordinary water (H2O), you can have semi-heavy water (HDO), heavy water aka deuterized water (D2O) and super heavy water aka tritiated water (T2O).
Tritiated water is radioactive.
It’s not. Things that have water on them are wet, water is not.
It’s extraordinarily rare to interact with a single H2O molecule.
Therefore, the overwhelming majority of water is wet.