A Water Molecule's Chemical Formula Isn't Really H20 103
hackwrench writes "According to this article in Physics News Update, a water molecule's chemical formula is really not H2O, at least from the perspective of neutrons and electrons interacting with the molecule for only attoseconds (less than 10-15 seconds). According to new and recent experiments, neutrons and electrons colliding with water for just attoseconds will see a ratio of hydrogen to oxygen of roughly 1.5 to 1, so a more accurate formula for water under these circumstances would be H1.5O."
Chemistry... (Score:2)
H20, H1.5O, HwhateverO. It still tastes great!
You're not tasting water (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You're not tasting water (Score:1)
Be careful (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Be careful (Score:2)
"Athletes use it to perform better. Inhaling it can kill you. It is the main component of acid rain! Find out the dangers of DiHydrogen Monoxide today!"
http://www.dhmo.org/ [dhmo.org]
Re:Chemistry... (Score:1)
LESS FILLING!!!!
Question. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Question. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Question. (Score:1)
no, that looks like 2 molecules with 3 hydrogen and one oxygen atom each, wich doesn't really make any sense.
i guess what you mean is H302, which wouldn't be right either, but would (apperently) have the right proportion of hydrogen and oxygen atoms
Re:Question. (Score:2)
Re:Question. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Question. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what you get when two fields collide like this. H2O is a stoichiometric formula, it's not supposed to represent the actual molecule at all times. If the ratio for water was actually 3:2 instead of 2:1, fuel cells (like on US space missions) would wind up with an excess of hydrogen after reaction. That has not been observed. Also, if you electrolyze water, you get a 2:1 molar ratio of H to O. Not a 3:2 ratio.
If yu take pure water, you will not find a homogeneous mixture of molecu
Re:Question. (Score:1)
Don't you mean a deficit of hydrogen? 3/5 is less than 2/3
Re:Question. (Score:3, Funny)
It can't be that, since water doesn't contain phosphorus.
C3PO:
C
|
C = C - P = O
Re:Question. (Score:1)
Re:Question. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Question. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I exaggerate. But you got to admit that modern physics is really weird.
Re:Question. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Question. (Score:1)
Re:Question. (Score:2)
Re:Question. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question. (Score:1)
Still water! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Still water! (Score:1)
Re:H2O, H3O, and OH (Score:1, Funny)
Re:H2O, H3O, and OH (Score:3, Funny)
Re: H2O, H3O, and OH (Score:3, Funny)
> The big deal is you'd end up with a glass 125% full of water.
It keeps you from getting bogged down in the half-empty/half-full debate.
Re:H2O, H3O, and OH (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, but if you take a couple of sips, then you'll have a glass that
is three-quarters full and three-quarters empty. Get another glass
just like it, drink yet a few _more_ sips out of it, until it's
one-quarter full and one-quarter empty, pour them together, and the
glass will be full and not full. You know, the full glass that
cannot be empty is not the true full glass, and all that zen rot.
Re:H2O, H3O, and OH (Score:2)
What a complicated procedure to get a glass that's both full and empty!
I usually just get two glasses that are both half full and half empty and pour them together.
Re:H2O, H3O, and OH (Score:1)
water in time (Score:1)
Re:water in time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:water in time (Score:4, Insightful)
This was a funny, but it's also very true. People forget that the instrumentation used is also subject to error. I once spent a day hunting down a network problem, only to realize that the test equipment was creating the error, not the equipment under test. All the same model equipment from that manufacturer had the flaw, which we proved with test equipment from two other manufacturers.
Can you say WRONG (Score:5, Interesting)
Bah! The interpretation given this research is absurd. If I invented a new machine to count the legs on cows, and my machine said that typical cows had three legs each, what would we conclude? That we'd been wrong about cows all these years, or that my machine wasn't working quite the way I'd expected it to?
In the present case, a better headline would have been something like "Unexpected effect hides some protons in neutron & electron scattering experements."
-- MarkusQ
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:3, Funny)
=Smidge=
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:2, Flamebait)
So that's how they got the extra hydrogen in there...
Add a little hydrofluoric acid and poof!!!
2 HF + 2 H2O + 2 O2 => 2 H3O2 + 2 FOOF
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:2)
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:1)
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
The absurdity in the article makes one wonder where we've been getting all that hydrogen from for all these years. We've been cracking H2O with electrolysis and been getting both H's pretty consistently for decades. The experiments that show the PH are pretty solid as well, so it seems a little early to start theorizing that black holes are giving off the extra half a mole of Hydrogen we've been getting out of a mole of water.
The cool part (that they seemed to entirely miss) is that these techniques could be used to confirm/reject models for wave-theory covalent bonding. Maybe that tough little benzene ring is resonant at more than just the electron shell level....
More than elementary chemistry (Score:2)
Meaning that if the water has a pH of 7 then we should be expecting something closer H1.999O. If the difference is flawed experimentation, I would expect proper scientific reserarch to explain this, just as I'd expect it to explain the reasons t
Re:More than elementary chemistry (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning that if the water has a pH of 7 then we should be expecting something closer H1.999O.
No, we should expect to find a mix of H2O, H, and OH. In any macroscopic volume the ratio between H & O should be 2, not 1.999 or even 1.9999999. The pH shouldn't even enter into it (if the H+'s collectively wandered a macroscopic distance from the OH-'s, water would be incredibly dangerous).
Remember, they were looking at the H's & O's via p + n & p + e scattering.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:2)
-n
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:2, Informative)
From the article: "Apparently, the protons in hydrogen were sometimes "invisible" to the neutron probes. While the exact details are still being debated by theorists, the researchers' own theoretical considerations suggest the presence of short-lived (sub-femtosecond) entanglement, in which protons in adjacent hydrogen atom
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:2)
Re-read my post. I didn't offer an "interpretation of the article" (which I did read before posting). I said that interpretation of the article and headline posted on slashdot (which, I might point out, someone else submitted to slashdot) was absurd. You may be right in thinking it was a "hook" to get people to read the article; I know such tactics are common in tabloid journalism and in movie adverts. That doesn't mean that it wasn't absurd.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Can you say WRONG (Score:1)
As to the Slashdot article itself, the submitter made sure to use terms like "from the perspective of" and "under these circumstances".
RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
RMFP (Score:2)
And if you had read my post, you would have noticed that I was making the same point you are, specifically that the headline and blurb were totatally absurd and unrelated to the research. To recap:
Re:RMFP (Score:1)
Re:RMFP (Score:2)
Only if you ignore some of the words in his comment.
Well, naturally. When one skims text that fast, some of the words will becone entangled with other words and so not seem to be there at all.
Magnitudes and Quantum effects (Score:1)
The original poster seems to imply the experiments were performed on a femtosecond time-scale (10^-15) as opposed to the attosecond (10^-18). The confusion may come from the fact that the article says something about probing
It's a scam (Score:3, Funny)
What they don't tell you is that they got a bunch of other "corrections" under their sleeve. You know, because in a year or so they're going to need another excuse to roll out a new edition.
Quite similar to Microsoft's "pay us to upgrade, so you can patch up the bugs we created in the first place!" biz model, actually.
Scientist to struggling chemistry students... (Score:4, Funny)
Their results are suspect (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Their results are suspect (Score:1)
but what they found was trihydrogendioxide.
No single instant of time (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No single instant of time (Score:2)
10**-15 seconds.
Re:No single instant of time (Score:2, Interesting)
and
Post: That should be 10^-15 seconds, not 10-15 seconds.
Nonetheless, an attosecond is still less than 10 to 15 seconds, as correctly stated in the article.
Lol.
Re:No single instant of time (Score:2, Funny)
Lower interaction rate, not fewer atoms. (Score:5, Insightful)
The conjecture about why the phenomenon occurs (entanglement of protons) is interesting, but they're going to need to find a plausible mechanism and confirm that it's happening before we really know what's going on.
Re:Lower interaction rate, not fewer atoms. (Score:2)
Whoops; they used benzene, not hexane, for the hydrocarbon test. My bad.
Re:Lower interaction rate, not fewer atoms. (Score:2)
H-2-WHOA!! (Score:5, Funny)
H-2-WHOA!
Q.
Change water all you want (Score:5, Funny)
But consider yourselves warned: Leave my caffeine molecule alone!
Re:Change water all you want (Score:2, Funny)
Speaking of, I think I need some more espresso. I hope the hydrogen in the water I'm about to boil hasn't read this article... or 1/4 of the hydrogen atoms might suddenly dissasociate from the water and explode!
By my references... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:By my references... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:By my references... (Score:3, Informative)
Power Prefix Abbreviation
-24 yocto y
-21 zepto z
-18 atto a
-15 femto f
-12 pico p
-9 nano n
-6 micro \mu (greek lower case m)
-3 milli m
-2 centi c
-1 deci d
1 deca D
2 hecto h
3 kilo k
6 mega M
9 giga G
12 tera T
15 peta P
18 exa E
21 zetta Z
24 yotta Y
Handy when you are working on things of these sizes, but both extreme
Can't wait... (Score:1, Funny)
H1.5 (Score:2, Interesting)
this is really stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
Take one water molecule and it will be H2O What comes into play when multiple particles collide has nothign to do with anything
Re:this is really stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the boiling point of one molecule of water?
if not for the hydrogen bonds between adjacent H2O molecules, water would have a much lower boiling point than is observed. A single molecule of H2O would have no hydrogen bonding. Perhaps it's boiling point would be in line with the rest of the H2_ series (The BP of H2S is about -60C, for example). Thus, because it does not have all the physical properties, an H2O molecule is not the same as a water molecule. In fact, we don't get the behaviour of wate
Wish there was more detail on the experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, if they are just shooting electrons and neutrons at water and counting how many hit hydrogen nuclei and how many hit oxygen nuclei, you would expect a larger number than normal to hit oxygen since the nucleus is larger (three times the protons and neutrons of hydrogen). They do say "25% fewer protons than expected", but they don't say what they expected or why.
Also, did they have the water in a vacuum chamber? If not, there would be dissolved gasses present in the water that their beam could hit as well. I didn't notice any count for Nitrogen so they must not have done it in a glass sitting on a table, but they don't say.
Re:Wish there was more detail on the experiment (Score:2)
Wild Speculation! (Score:1)
Was I the only one thinking... (Score:2)
What about the other stuff in water? (Score:1)
We may have CH2O or FeH1.5O.
I know those of us who went to public schools know what I'm talking about.
Re:What about the other stuff in water? (Score:1)
Public school indeed.
Aha!! (Score:1)
Too fast? (Score:2, Insightful)
"H-Sesqu-O" (H1.5O) (Score:2)
H-Sesqu-O
Pronounced: (three syllables) h * cess * quo '
Of course, I don't believe them. (I have an MS in Organic Chemistry). Lets see them get out a Dissolved Oxygen Meter [horiba.com] and prove that dissolved oxygen isn't affecting their results...
nothing new (Score:1)
What this basically means is that water exists in a networkd (read hydrogen bonded) state where hydrogen and oxygen atoms are shared, so the effective formula is a bit different.
Won't affect the textbooks, don't worry!!
Re:nothing new (Score:2)
No, the editing/summary of the paper isn't very good. The thing is, one expects to the contributions of the scattering of the individual atoms to sum linearly at the energies used. An analogy might be that you found a compound that was more or less radioactive than expected from the proportio
10-15 seconds, huh? (Score:2)
Yeah, like about 10-15 seconds LESS than 10-15 seconds.
An attosecond is 10^-18s. Your description, while perfectly accurate, could still be accurate if it were 19 orders of magnitude smaller. :)
Difference btw. molecules and compounds (Score:2)
Chemically speaking...
A molecule is something with a molecular formula, made up of a specific number of atoms (i.e., integer numbers). It also has a particular shape and its bonds are arranged in a particular way. Change one atom or one bond and you change the molecule and its properties.
A compound (like some of the zeolites and semiconductors others have mentioned) is a mix of bonded atoms that, on average have a formula that may contain fractions or decimals. Because this is an average, the compound