[HN Gopher] New evidence shows water separates into two differen...
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New evidence shows water separates into two different liquids at
low temperature
Author : voisin
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-08-21 21:00 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.birmingham.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.birmingham.ac.uk)
| sidlls wrote:
| Nature article link:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01698-6
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Evidence?
|
| > computer simulations
|
| > model
|
| > model
|
| > computational work
|
| > computational evidence
|
| > colloidal model
|
| I'm sorry, theory's great and all, but I'm not interested. Call
| me when you see this in water _not_ dreamed up in silico, okay?
| Yeah, I know, supercritical is hard, but... that 's kind of the
| point, yeah? Why trust your model if we know this stuff is hard?
| Why care if it can never be realized? (Okay, you got me, I'm a
| constructivist too.)
|
| (Must every press release by a British university be trash?)
| indymike wrote:
| > Call me when you see this in water not dreamed up in silico,
| okay?
|
| The article, surprisingly was pretty clear about this. The
| headline? Pretty sensationalist.
|
| > (Must every press release by a British university be trash?)
|
| This has been the bane of science for as long as science has
| been around: How do you take something that isn't particularly
| interesting to laypersons and help them understand how
| important this little micro-bit of progress might be... on not
| be... It's hard.
| jaywalk wrote:
| This little micro-bit of progress simply is not important to
| laypersons. I'm sure it's interesting to people in the field,
| but otherwise it's nothing.
| indymike wrote:
| > This little micro-bit of progress simply is not important
| to laypersons
|
| Yes. Unfortunately, a little press goes a long way in
| getting funded, so we'll all be reading these over-hyped
| science press releases for a long time.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > This has been the bane of science for as long as science
| has been around: How do you take something that isn't
| particularly interesting to laypersons and help them
| understand how important this little micro-bit of progress
| might be... on not be... It's hard.
|
| I mean, I've seen my own work go through the Science News
| Cycle ( https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
| ). I know what it's like. I'm just pointing out that British
| universities have a reputation for being absolutely terrible
| about this, to the degree that there's no point trusting a
| single thing their PR departments say anymore.
| [deleted]
| arrrg wrote:
| It seems the article extremely clearly communicates (as your
| plentiful quotes aptly demonstrate) that the evidence in
| question is a computational model.
|
| I do not get your point about this being bad science
| communication at all. Your own quotes demonstrate that the
| press release is crystal clear about the type of evidence.
|
| Your beef is with the science, not the communication. And you
| shouldn't mix those two up.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > Your beef is with the science, not the communication. And
| you shouldn't mix those two up.
|
| No, my beef is that communicating this was irresponsible
| because it does not represent meaningful progress in an
| accurate understanding of the physics of water, and thus no
| impression should be given that it does.
|
| Science grows through communication. The two are not
| separable.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I am someone that regularly rails against in silico work,
| but come on. Treat this as a sanity check to start
| understanding
|
| 1. if the colloidal thought model explains unexplained
| observables
|
| 2. If the colloidal model makes predictions not observed
| yet.
|
| It might be too harsh to say this is not a meaningful
| advance. The system may be too difficult to make
| predictions without a computer, so having a thought model
| is useless. Now that we have a computer model, we can start
| doing experimental work that we _wouldn 't have chosen to
| do otherwise_.
| [deleted]
| mdaniel wrote:
| > New evidence > ... > The team has used computer simulations to
| help explain what features distinguish the two liquids at the
| microscopic level
|
| I regrettably(?) don't have the physics background to interpret
| the actual paper (linked in the sibling comment), but saying
| "computer simulations" are "evidence" seems suspect to me
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Evidence is not proof, it is evidence. It is still valuable
| because it can guide the way to experiments that give us
| empirical proof, or refutation of the conjecture.
| hackernewds wrote:
| It behooves the authors to present the limitations of the
| study. Lay people, unfortunately the majority, will interpret
| this to be definitive.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Lay people, unfortunately the majority, will interpret
| this to be definitive.
|
| They're not the target audience of scientific papers.
| colinsane wrote:
| > The researchers used a colloidal model of water in their
| simulation, and then two widely used molecular models of water.
| Colloids are particles that can be a thousand times larger than a
| single water molecule. By virtue of their relatively bigger size,
| and hence slower movements, colloids are used to observe and
| understand physical phenomena that also occur at the much smaller
| atomic and molecular length scales.
|
| > Dr Chakrabarti, a co-author, says: "This colloidal model of
| water provides a magnifying glass into molecular water, and
| enables us to unravel the secrets of water concerning the tale of
| two liquids."
|
| this seems backward to me? the colloidal model sounds like a
| higher level model of molecular water: the opposite of a
| magnifying glass. or is it that they model several molecules
| _within_ the context of a single colloid, and by modeling only
| one colloid instead of a larger volume it becomes computationally
| feasible to use a more detailed model of the molecular behavior
| within that small space?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The key preposition being "into". It gives us the ability to
| peer _into_ molecular water [from our macroscopic perspective]
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