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 bacteria.
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.
> If it is man-made, and they are keeping that from us, then it is a conspiracy. Therefore, conspiracy theory.
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 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
"Conspiracy theory" is usually used in the non-technical sense of the word to be derogatory, or imply that the theory is false; conspiracy theories that the writer doesn't want to imply as false (e.g. Epstein didn't kill himself, members of Congress engaging in insider trading) seem to not usually be described using the specific phrase "conspiracy theory" - even when that's what they are.
I get the derogatory nature of the term, but both of your examples include groups of people keeping information from the rest of us. I'm curious if you have an example of a derogatory conspiracy theory that doesn't have a literal conspiracy in it.
My point was that the above example was called a conspiracy theory because it was against the norm, not merely because it was a conspiracy, because there are conspiracies that aren't called that because of the connotations of the term. I'm not saying that the term describes non-conspiracies.
I think GP was referring to Montagnier's support of the water memory theory (a fraudulent theory made up to support homeopathy), rather than his comments on covid 19.
> 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.
Or it is uncorrelated. I personally met a successful local technical innovation guy who believed in perpetual motion / free energy devices and told me stories about their “presentations”.
Yes. That’s why the pictures and article are worth checking out. Anything having to do with “water structure” rankles scientists. But see for yourself.
The five things mentioned in the article are clearly observed unknowns about water. Water memory and other “out there” theories are exactly that - out there with minimal or no evidence (if not mainly evidence to the contrary), so most people don’t give it a serious thought. You’re free of course to still formulate the hypothesis and test it, but it’s not totally surprising you’re not able to convince more people to take it seriously until you show real data. Not that I appreciate the way academia works but we can’t blame them for our inability to prove our pet theories.
I bet when you told people about your work, you had some actual loonies get reaaal excited to.
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....
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.
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?
> 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?
"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.
>> events before the big bang can have no observational consequences
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.
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.
One of the theories is that inflationary cosmology leads to inflationary cosmology: where one universe's big bang's inflation leads to pockets of inflation that can extend beyond the universe they came from -- effectively creating their own universe. Then a big bang extends from that, which repeats into their own inflationary systems, which repeats into their own system, etc. It's a theory from the 80s IIRC.
I think "the big bang" has a problem of changing meaning. Here's my understanding:
- 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.
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."
It's not known that there was a single point in time that was the start of our universe. Our current models can pretty reliably calculate the history of the universe back to a specific point, which would be 10^-32 seconds after this big bang point in time, but those models don't work earlier than that.
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?
This is around the very controversial question of whether amorphous water can have a structure. Controversy, because homeopathy. Pretty pictures, though!
This is another rabbit hole: using EMF to dissociate H&O in saltwater, making it appear to burn. Like, electrode less electrolysis—but damn cool that radio waves can do this!
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.
> 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.
But where did the water come from? Neptune? Europa? Comet(s)? Is it just the distance to our nearest star in our habitable zone here that results in liquid water being likely?
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.
> 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]
Tangentially related, go watch a Delta IV launch. The RS-68 burns hydrogen, therefore the exhaust plume is literally water.
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.
You can also learn a lot, albeit of a more practical nature, at https://mytapwater.org. Drinking is the more important, and one of the least considered uses of water for most of us.
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".
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 other than a cascading state-change of that other. It doesn't make sense.
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.
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.
A prion causing other proteins to misfold can only occur if the misfolded state has lower energy than the correctly folded one. It does this by acting as a catalyst, lowering the potential energy barrier that was allowing the protein to persist in the correctly folded state, to the point where e.g thermal fluctuations allow it to cross that barrier. The equivalent could occur if there was a lower energy state for water (and an ice-9 like scenario could then occur if this lower energy state catalyzed further transitions to this lower energy state). We don't expect this to be possible though, as we can't make water decay by other ways of making it cross that hypothetical potential energy barrier by dumping energy into it (whereas for a protein you can e.g burn it, denature it, etc), and aren't aware of catalytic activity by any forms of water.
Thanks for the comment. Thinking out loud, for prions is not the requirement that they "[act] as a catalyst, lowering the potential energy barrier ... to the point where e.g thermal fluctuations allow it to cross that barrier" also a guarantee against this type of ice-9 "infection" scenario, because the equilibrium of the environment itself would be so impacted and be absorbing that energy and then causing unfavorable conditions to the reaction at the reaction's frontier even? I more-or-less equate that to the "supercooled water + normal ice" reaction of how much energy delta you can create allows you to make a small energy explosion reaction/state-change/etc that isn't truly an "infection" but just a localized energy transfer.
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 :)
It depends. Tin pest is an autocalaytic reaction that doesn't produce enough energy to destabilize its own progression. One could say the same for rust, as it flakes and is porous allowing further rusting. Or the chain reaction could proceed faster than the environmental changes destabilize it - like a nuclear chain reaction, or metastable vacuum collapse. Or it could self regulate into a steady state, like a nuclear reactor. Also consider that the energy released could itself cause further reactions - like a fire. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalysis for more.
Yes, it seems unlikely that any such transition exists for liquid water - a water molecule doesn't have any molecular degrees of freedom like a protein does, nor any easy way to extract energy from it (it's "already burnt"), and we haven't found any exotic structures of water that are stable at atmospheric pressures.
Both are, essentially, about crystalline structure. That sounds quite similar to a phase change to me. Especially if we consider ice to have multiple phases.
Yes, I see your point. I disagree for water such a phase change could be discovered under earth-like conditions, but I can see how "sufficiently complex" substances with reasonable energy deltas in their phase-/structural-changes could be "attacked/exploited/triggered" to look like an infection-style reaction. My stream of conscious while realizing this is here: [0]
Just a nitpick but the process of crystallization evolves energy rather than involves. So it’s proceeding to a lower-entropy state. If we wanted to trigger such a transformation we’d have to involve machinery so you’re right in that sense. But there are other ways in which the universe stumbles into lower-entropy states sometimes, including crystallization from a super-saturated solution. Super-saturation could be driven by something as simple as the day/night cycle
The real concern is: what are we going to do with all the dihydrogen monoxide that has been repeatedly found in our water supply? At certain dosages this chemical is toxic to humans, and in some chemical states it can even cause severe burns.
"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."
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).
The number of available valence shell electrons, not the atomic nuclei is typically the controlling factor for macroscale chemical properties of elements. This typically is in balance with the nucleus' positive charge, but does not have to be.
Water molecules are molecules, and therefore have a more complex electronic structure than atoms, and therefore is harder to describe, especially at the extremes.
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 ;)
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.
What I did not know is that because hydrogen has various isotopes such as deuterium (D) and tritium (T), some rarer forms of water exist.
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).
Understatement but water makes life possible on earth.
Water's properties of ice floating and heat latency etc etc which otherwise would have made life impossible.
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.