Water Structure and Science

This page forms the entrance to a website concerned with the physical, chemical and biological properties of water.

Liquid water is not a bit player in the theatre of life — it’s the headline act

Many regard water (H₂O) as a rather uninteresting substance because it is transparent, odorless, tasteless and ubiquitous. It is the simplest compound of the two most common reactive elements in the universe, consisting of just two hydrogen atoms attached to a single oxygen atom. Indeed, very few molecules are smaller or lighter. Liquid water, however, is the most extraordinary material contradicting its apparently simple molecular constituent. ⇒

Although we drink it, wash, fish and swim in it, and cook with it (although probably not all at the same time), we nearly always overlook the special relationship it has with our lives. Droughts cause famines and floods cause death and disease. It makes up over about half of us and, without it, we die within a few days. Liquid water has importance as a solvent, a solute, a reactant, a catalyst, and a biomolecule, structuring proteins, nucleic acid, and cells and controlling our consciousness. H₂O is the second most common molecule in the Universe (behind hydrogen, H₂), the most abundant solid material and fundamental to star formation. There is a hundred times as many water molecules in our bodies than the sum of all the other molecules put together, with billions of water molecules per DNA molecule. Life cannot evolve or continue without liquid water, which is why there is so much excitement about finding it on Mars and other planets and moons. It is unsurprising that water plays a central role in many of the World's Religions. This website discusses many aspects of water science. ⇒

Water is the most studied material on Earth, but it is remarkable to find that the science behind its behavior and function are so poorly understood (or even ignored), not only by people in general but also by scientists working with it every day. It can be extremely slippery and extremely sticky at the same time, and this 'stick/slip' behavior is how we recognize the feel of water. The small size of its molecule belies the complexity of its actions and its unique capabilities. Many attempts to model water as a simple substance have failed and still are failing. Liquid water's unique properties and chameleonic nature seem to fit ideally into the requirements for life as can no other molecule. ⇒

Many explanations of the complex behavior of liquid water have been published, with several stirring up considerable controversy. In this website, I have attempted to present and explain these ideas in a self-consistent and balanced manner, which I hope will encourage both its understanding and further work. ⇒

Water Site Map

Notes.

Text, HTML markup, and images at this website are copyright. Maintenance of this site has no connection with commercial organizations or their products. Please do not copy from this site, or from the occasional pirated copies of this site, without proper acknowledgment back to this site. Pirated copies can usually be determined from their outdated date-stamps.

This site represents the views of the author, mostly without prior peer review but supported by peer-reviewed papers. It attempts to give an unbiased, neutral point of view. Comments and criticisms are welcomed both by email and by using the Visitors book. I have always guaranteed to publish all submissions via the Visitor's book, only lightly editing their spelling and grammar and removing gratuitous advertisements, spam or offensive material.

Calculations using the Restricted Hartree-Fock wave function (RHF) using the 6-31G** basis set make use of the Hyperchem Professional 8.0 package. To see all the animations, you will need to be java enabled. Jmol is an open-source Java viewer for chemical structures in 3D. Some interactive pages use Chemical Objects for the Web (*.cow) or Jmol (*.pdb) files. The (*.cow) HyperChem Web Viewer (2 MB) is available free from Hypercube, Inc. It seems that Internet Explorer 11 may be the easiest program to set up for javascript on Windows 10..

If you wish to consult previous versions of this website, there are 743 copies on the Wayback Internet Archive (as of 10 March 2019) archived between October 1 2000 and February 24 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.sbu.ac.uk/water/ and https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/).

As at 26 Sept 2018, this Water Structure and Science website has 294 webpages, 4,421 references, 28,549 links, 308,800 words, 1,435 images, and 121 3-D visualization and animation files. The mean readability has been assessed as similar to that of the New York Times. The data in this Web site has stood the test of time with chunks of it copied into Wikipedia and a recent Chemical Reviews. There are over 2,600 scientific citations of this website from Google Scholar.