The Fourth Phase of Water’s Many Puzzlers
As described in the separate post, the book The Fourth Phase of Water offers solutions for many curiosities that have defied explanation for centuries, the most famous being the problem of Brownian motion undertaken by Einstein in 1905.
Just for fun, here is a list of some of the puzzles posed by the science of water, focusing just on simple direct observations that have had no clear and satisfactory explanation. Excluded are another list of more esoteric problems, such as “the memory of water” experiments by Benveniste, Montagnier, Emoto, Radin and others. Those deserve a separate article!
Why is wet sand so solid?
How do Tsunami waves travel such great distances?
Why doesn’t water leak out of gels?
Why does ice behave differently from other solids, in slipperiness and stickiness?
Why does water rush into a wound and cause such swelling?
Why does a frozen dessert harden faster with warm water than cold water?
How does water rise in tall plants?
How can water-filled roots break concrete?
Why does water spread out on some surfaces (“hydrophilic”) and bead up (hydrophobic”) on others?
How can some animals “walk on water”?
How can there be isolated cloud formations in an otherwise cloudless sky?
How do joints not squeak?
Why is ice less dense than water?
What enables water to bridge itself between containers?
Why do water droplets persist on water for surprisingly long amounts of time?
What causes the high-voltage electrical discharge in Lord Kelvin’s famous experiment?
Why does the nose have a positive charge relative to the feet (by 200 volts!)
Why does the atmosphere turn with the earth, instead of the earth sliding underneath it?
How is the atmosphere such an efficient conductor of radio waves?
Why does the bottom of the sea (with minimal light or dissolved oxygen) have so many creatures?
Why do seemingly identical chemical reactions have such different elapsed times?
What causes “paradoxical attraction” in which charged positive or negatives attract each other?
What causes Brownian motion (micro-agitation of small particles in water)? Einstein’s solution (1905) does not account for the data.
Why does dust stay in the air for so long, instead of settling to the floor?
How did Montagnier duplicate DNA just by close proximity, not actual contact?
Why does hardening concrete emit heat?
Why does vortexed water cool down?
How does vortexing induce liquid crystal formation?
When a river meets the ocean, why do they not mix readily?
Why all the problems with the standard explanation of osmosis and diffusion?
Why does water between icebergs turn viscous?
What creates the sounds arising from heating water to a boil?
Why does vapor over a cup of tea move in puffs and thin streams?
What causes the faint mosaic pattern visible in warm water?
Why do window screens reduce air flow so much more than can be explained mechanically?
What happens when we skip rocks on a lake?
What accounts for water’s famous surface tension anomalies?
Why do wet glass slides stick together firmly, but still glide?
Why does water rise higher than the surrounding level when a capillary tube is inserted?
How can ships sometimes sink with no trace of debris?