The properties of water to me are amazing.... it expands when it freezes making it possible for water to still flow in winter and save fish life.... ice floats to the top, thus preventing rivers from permanently freezing in most climates. God couldn't have made it more special.
Wood, metal, and water are neatly combined in Winslow Homer's painting above. Mankind has journeyed from continent to continent for thousands of years across oceans using crafts such as this.
Wood is composed of polymers of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, three of the four most abundant elements in the universe. Their percentages throughout the universe are hydrogen - 75%; oxygen - .05%; carbon - .0081%. Their respective weights in earth's crust, are 47% oxygen, .1% hydrogen and .02% carbon.
"Scientia" is Latin for "truth," and is the root word for "science."
Interesting Thought ExperimentSuppose you took just over a tablespoon of water (1.22 tablespoons, actually), and put it into a glass. If you could wave a magic wand over that water, increasing the size of every water molecule to just half an inch, what would be the volume of the water afterward? Go big. Go really, really, really big.
The Big Water would raise the ocean level about 1,300 feet worldwide. This gives you a good idea as to how small atoms and molecules are.
Bendy LightWater slows down light, and in the process, bends it. If water did not slow down and bend light, everyone would be blind, as corneas and vitreous humors are largely water. Eyesight is pretty cool. Water is just one reason, but an essential one. Water. Wow. Brought to you by the Maker of trees, and metals.
The Triple PointThere is a temperature/pressure curve for water, steam, and ice. All of them can coexist in equilibrium indefinitely. (.01 C and .06 atmospheres) To me, this is hard to conceive but only mildly interesting compared to other incredible properties of water. Some of the most important, most beneficial characteristics of water are:
1. Transparency. - Water is almost completely transparent to visible light. Great for skin diving, or seeing your fish come up on the end of a fishing line.
2. Colorlessness. - Water isn't just clear, it's also colorless, like glass. You could not see without the transparency and refractive properties of water, which makes up about 99% of your vitreous humor. If water did not transmit light perfectly, everyone would be blind. Your eyes, by the way, can detect the smallest unit of energy known, a single photon of light. Eyes see over a range of ~14 orders of magnitude in intensity.
3. Profound recyclability - Useful as a tool (steam powered motors) or a refreshment, it can go from inside cells to inside clouds and oceans, and remain stable.
4. Solvent - The most important and most abundant solvent on earth, it can dissolve rocks.
5. Capacity to hold heat, or absorb it, is 33 times higher than gold. This prodigious heat capacity of water is 80 times greater for freezing/melting it; 540 times greater for boiling/condensing it. Wow!
(Aluminum, iron,and gold have temperature/heat slopes 5, 10, and 33 times as steep as the C-F line for liquid water. Compare that to F-G.)