Bending of the Water Counterwave

I’ve been laboring over writing a manuscript that describes supramolecular motion in a mathematically rigorous way. I had already written about how lignin is formed (a topic I should probably write its own post: my older posts aren’t bad, but there’s new info to be shared), but when I started writing about water, I got stuck for a while. The problem always boils down to precision. I can always claim that molecules magically align just properly so that you’ll get complex helices, but water is water without complex mechanisms. The explanation must be easy.

Luckily it didn’t take long for me to realize that the theory of the counterwave is actually the key to how water behaves. The theory states that light, being a sinusoidal wave, must be mathematically consistent with the properties of sinusoidal waves. However, if you take a propagating helix, it has a sinusoidal component, but it also has a component that is makes the wave three-dimensional. While the combination of electric and magnetic fields makes light sort of three-dimensional, it’s not the same three-dimensionality as in light. So, what you need is to get to propagating helices with opposite turns, rotating in the opposite directions.  This means that while the motion in one plane looks sinusoidal, the components in the third dimension cancel out. Or are turned into a magnetic field: a chemist really doesn’t need to know about fields.

Anyhow, my insight was that if light is made of two helical waves rotating in opposite directions, why wouldn’t water do so as well? By the way, because lignin is formed in such a different way, it isn’t a counterwave, which has been misleading.  After many fits and starts, I realized that water molecules must move as a helix within a helix. I had applied this idea for a long time into earlier versions of the theory, but this time I actually have a reasonable physical explanation for this. You see, if water is present as two entangled helices/waves (a term often used in popular quantum mechanics as well), and these two entangled helices are wound into a larger helix, this means that the vibrational component is a rotational component after all: it’s just that the forward component is so small that if one didn’t know it’s rotation, one would mistake this motion for vibration. Or perhaps the more apt way of saying is that vibration isn’t (always/never?) random.

So, what does this helix of helices look like? I made a rough preliminary model, which is obviously still at least a bit wrong, but it illustrates the concept:

In this model, the entangled helix turn a single turn, where the larger helix turns two turns. This way, on one side the vibrating water molecules stack into four stings of spheres (water being simplified into a sphere), while on the other side the string form horizontal pairs, with plenty of space between them. This means that this helix can bend with minimal external forces. To explain exactly why so would require a longer post, though.

I still need to work on this model, because it’s obviously not perfect, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it shouldn’t take too long.