The Shape of the Surface of Water
“Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.”
— Lao Tzu
It’s winter so I’ve been thinking a lot about water. How it’s all around us here in Idaho as rain on the roads, or ice, as fog in the air, as snow on the hills, and how weird it is that regardless of temperature, water fills and becomes the shape of its container.
But did you know there are different kinds of water? Like molecularly? At the basic molecular level, tetrahedral which is “Why Water is Weird” according to Richard Saykally a chemist at U.C. Berkeley who Brian Gallagher wrote about in an article called “Why Water is Weird” which cleverly leads with the story of how Bruce Lee came up with his idea of flow in martial arts: to be like water.
The story goes that he came to this one day while sailing with his teacher. Working through the art of detachment, Lee became frustrated and punched the water. It’s then he had his realization to be like water.
Saykally got to thinking about water one day after one of his young daughters asked him, “Why is water wet?” It became obvious that the reason is strong tetrahedral hydrogen bonding. What happens is that the four sided shape leaves the surface of water flat at the molecular level. Then it gets really weird. There’s evidently nothing between the surface of water and whatever is next to water because of image-charge repulsion. Molecularly speaking of course. The interview with Saykally is fascinating.
In this meditation about the vastness of what I don’t know about water I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005: “This is Water.” He begins with a story of two young fish swimming along and they meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” And the two fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” Wallace follows, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”
Like the poet John S. Hall says, “There’s water in many, many things. You can live without many things, but you can’t live without water.”
Stay hydrated lovely people.