Following from my last post on the bigger and better structure of water vapor, this time I’m taking the bull by its horns and talk about vibration in water.
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about bad vibrations in water and about the current understanding that individual water molecules are vibrating because of their impact with other water molecules. This is a completely logical assumption, if you think that water molecules are randomly bouncing around in water and gases.
However, if you think that water molecules aren’t bouncing around, but are tightly bound to each other with hydrogen bonds, what do the vibrations mean? Are individual water molecules vibrating, like in this Wikipedia illustration?
My answer is a very empathic “No!” This assumption would be silly if you assume that the molecules are being held tightly in place with double-helical arcs of elementary particles moving at the speed of light. That is, the arcs can stretch and bend, just like (or roughly like) in the above model. But this stretching and bending won’t be the kind of back-and-forth movement like in the model above. Rather, each of the water molecules in a supramolecular structure needs to be stretched or bent to allow for shape that isn’t totally flat.
So, in the case for the water vapor cylinder, if we made it into a closed loop, its shape would have to be a torus, or a donut. Like this:
The picture above is simply made by bending a tube by 360 degrees. This deforms the spheres into spheroids. In the inner surface of the torus, they are flattened into oblate spheroids and on the outer surface are elongated into prolate spheroids. And in the very center, they remain spherical.
Except they aren’t really spheres, but rather helices of dots around a spherical, or spheroidal volume. Like here:
And this is what this shape looks like when wrapped around a prolate volume:
And then wrapped around an oblate volume:
What this means is that rather than individual water molecules vibrating, some water molecules are stretched and some compressed, meaning that if you look at them on average, you could imagine this stretching and compressing to mean that they are vibrating.
However in reality the overall shape remains more or less static, but the elementary particles of elementary within the structure whizz around at the speed of light and the overall shape either rotates or otherwise moves at the speed defined by its temperature.
And this is what I call good vibrations!
Comments