I had and endless argument with some someone about this a while ago here’s how it works (in my opinion) wetness is not a fundamental property of water instead wetness is having water on or inside something so a towel is wet when it has water in it. But a singular water particle by itself is not wet because it is not surrounded by water but most water is wet because they are all surrounded by other water particles.
Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.
In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.
I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.
He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.
But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.
Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.
To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.
A particle of water may be surrounded by water but when we talk about water we’re usually referring to a body of water like that in a glass or pot rather than one particle thereof.
Is the water in that glass wet? No. The glass is wet.
A room can be “airy” but the air in that room is not “airy”.
I disagree if there is paint on the paint which there would be unless the paint is 1 particle thick then the paint has been painted.
I don’t know what airy means so I can’t comment on that though.
Water is wet
I had and endless argument with some someone about this a while ago here’s how it works (in my opinion) wetness is not a fundamental property of water instead wetness is having water on or inside something so a towel is wet when it has water in it. But a singular water particle by itself is not wet because it is not surrounded by water but most water is wet because they are all surrounded by other water particles.
H2O is not water
Is water a collection of H2O particles but not a H2O particle by itself?
Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.
In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.
I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.
He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.
But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.
Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.
To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.
A particle of water may be surrounded by water but when we talk about water we’re usually referring to a body of water like that in a glass or pot rather than one particle thereof.
Is the water in that glass wet? No. The glass is wet.
A room can be “airy” but the air in that room is not “airy”.
A car can be painted but paint is not painted.
… and so on and so forth.
Water is dry then?
That is a really good point, by saying water isn’t wet you are also saying that water is dry.
I disagree if there is paint on the paint which there would be unless the paint is 1 particle thick then the paint has been painted. I don’t know what airy means so I can’t comment on that though.