What Is Water?

On a simple level, we might say that water is bunch of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. That’s certainly accurate, although it’s pretty easy to go a level more complex: the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen atoms is exactly two to one.

Well… in a manner of speaking, anyway. The number of hydrogen atoms is indeed double the number of oxygen atoms in a given sample of water, but oxygen is 16 times heavier than hydrogen, so you might describe the amount of oxygen as greater than the amount of hydrogen. An oxygen atom has 16 protons and neutrons in its nucleus, whereas hydrogen (H) just has one proton.

Even less simplistic, you might say that water is made up of clusters of atoms called molecules, and that every molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. These molecules interact with one another in a manner that is different than if the atoms alone were there.

This is all well and good, but you don’t really see the dancing of the molecules when you pour yourself a glass of water. Water’s im…