- #106
dolphin
- 15
- 0
Just quickly:
In other words: if one of the minimum ingredients required for defining "liquid state" (at least in chemistry) is "several atoms or molecules interacting" (someone said six are required for water); then to talk of "one atom becoming liquid" is like talking of one brick becoming a house.
You could wait all day but never see a brick be anything other than a brick even after it was added to many others to form a house? Not quite; the brick would have undergone some pushes and pulls as it was moved into position with the other bricks.
It would become part of a circuit of strain in the building: you could perhaps measure a slight strain on the brick after the house was built.
If you did North's experiment and added hydrogen and oxygen atoms one by one; once you had enough of them and enough pressure and containment and a spark of energy to overcome the energy barrier you could get water.
Would the hydrogen and oxygen atoms be any different then? To measure one of them surely you would have to separate it out by doing electrolysis of water (pass an electric current through the water and see what happens at a zinc and a carbon electrode diped in the water).
But whatever hidden stress or strain was in the individual atom would presumably be released via electrolysis, so your collected hydrogen and oxygen would look just as they usually do?
Similarly pull a brick from a house and whatever strain it is under is gone. If the brick was made of rubber it might expand a bit after you pulled it out. It is conceivable that atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are slightly squashed when in liquid form but that they avoid this by synchronising their respective squashed-ness by tumbling all over one another so some expand a bit while squashing others; but with an overall net lower volume than before the liquid condensed?
A liquid might be a self-referring volume, a single quantum (meeting) state of volume. A solid might be quantised area.
If this were the case then "water: a manifestation of what?" might be answered:
a manifestation of an ongoing exchange among its molecules re: their volume so that the sum of the volume of all the molecules added up based on statistics would be greater than the actual volume of the water divided by the number of water molecules.
You could suggest water is a manifestation of quantum tunneling.
-just some ideas thrown around!
-Alan
In other words: if one of the minimum ingredients required for defining "liquid state" (at least in chemistry) is "several atoms or molecules interacting" (someone said six are required for water); then to talk of "one atom becoming liquid" is like talking of one brick becoming a house.
You could wait all day but never see a brick be anything other than a brick even after it was added to many others to form a house? Not quite; the brick would have undergone some pushes and pulls as it was moved into position with the other bricks.
It would become part of a circuit of strain in the building: you could perhaps measure a slight strain on the brick after the house was built.
If you did North's experiment and added hydrogen and oxygen atoms one by one; once you had enough of them and enough pressure and containment and a spark of energy to overcome the energy barrier you could get water.
Would the hydrogen and oxygen atoms be any different then? To measure one of them surely you would have to separate it out by doing electrolysis of water (pass an electric current through the water and see what happens at a zinc and a carbon electrode diped in the water).
But whatever hidden stress or strain was in the individual atom would presumably be released via electrolysis, so your collected hydrogen and oxygen would look just as they usually do?
Similarly pull a brick from a house and whatever strain it is under is gone. If the brick was made of rubber it might expand a bit after you pulled it out. It is conceivable that atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are slightly squashed when in liquid form but that they avoid this by synchronising their respective squashed-ness by tumbling all over one another so some expand a bit while squashing others; but with an overall net lower volume than before the liquid condensed?
A liquid might be a self-referring volume, a single quantum (meeting) state of volume. A solid might be quantised area.
If this were the case then "water: a manifestation of what?" might be answered:
a manifestation of an ongoing exchange among its molecules re: their volume so that the sum of the volume of all the molecules added up based on statistics would be greater than the actual volume of the water divided by the number of water molecules.
You could suggest water is a manifestation of quantum tunneling.
-just some ideas thrown around!
-Alan