H2O: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball

Author:Philip Ball [Philip Ball]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Popular Science
ISBN: 9781780227498
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-29T18:00:00+00:00

Two waters, no ice

Liquid water therefore has a curious, metastable no man’s land in which strange things seem to happen; but we can’t get there (Fig. 7.5). In which case, you might say, why should we care? Well, it now appears that Angell’s ‘catastrophe’ could be the McGuffin of water’s story, like Frodo Baggins’s ring in The Lord of the Rings – a seemingly trivial curiosity that in fact holds tremendous import for the broader picture. To explain this behaviour, we may end up having to conclude that there is not one but two forms of liquid water.

This is just one of the interpretations currently on offer. More prosaically, it may be that the catastrophe is illusory – that the response functions aren’t really blowing up out of control at all. If we could only supercool water those few degrees further, perhaps we’d find that it doesn’t really do anything outrageous but just settles down again. In other words, maybe the no man’s land hides merely a wobble, not a singularity.

Well, that’s possible, but it would be a bit of an anticlimax. The alternative, which is now gaining support from experiments, is altogether more enticing. In 1992, physicist Gene Stanley, his graduate student Peter Poole and their coworkers at Boston University set out to investigate supercooled water through computer simulation. They mapped out the boundaries of their virtual Water World by simulating water over a range of low temperatures and different pressures.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.