Myriad Structures of Liquid Water: Introduction to the essential materials Science

Rustum Roy & Manju L. Rao

http://www.rustumroy.com/Scans/815%20The%20Myriad%20Structures%20of%20Li...

Abstract

The significance of water to life, including humans and human society and human technologies including energy, surpasses by orders of magnitude that of any other single material that MST members will ever work with. Yet, by and large, water has been left to chemists to study, and neglected by materials researchers. This paper focuses on the materials scientists' contribution to defining the structure, and the structure-property relations of water and ultradilute aquasols including all natural waters. The “black holes” in the materials science as we have learned and taught it, include: truncation of the number of easily accessed intensive variables in our thermodynamics textbooks from P, T E and H, to only P and T. Hence the gross neglect of the remarkable influence of radiation (acoustic and EM) on matter, especially at those special and rare
frequencies which cause resonance in the system at various levels. We present a summary of the 2008 version of the leading physicists' and chemists' views of the structure of water. We then summarize our own recent materials science perspective on the structure of water and present the substantive body of experimental evidence largely, but not only, from our laboratory, of some truly extraordinary changes caused by these new vectors on the structure of water, including some radically new phenomena such as the burning of water and imprinting of water by highly specific frequencies, and the creation of the myriad new (albeit poorly defined) and possibly metastable structures of water.