The life-giving properties of water based on a delicate balance, say scientists.
It turns out that life as we know it based on a random but incredibly delicate balance of quantum forces.
Water is one of the strangest fluid warming, and many of the most unusual properties make it invigorating. For example, higher density, which is a liquid rather than ice, allowing it to float on ...
water, so to help the fish survive beneath frozen lakes and rivers. And unlike many other fluids need much heat to warm even a few degrees Celsius, a feature that allows mammals to regulate their body temperature.
But recent computer simulations show that in quantum mechanics owes its life-giving water of these characteristics. Most of these patients due to hydrogen bonds that hold water molecules The on the 2nd O together in a networked structure. For example, hydrogen bonds are those that hold the molecules of ice in a more open structure than liquid water, leading thus to a lower density. In contrast, without hydrogen bonds, liquid water molecules could move freely and take up more space than the rigid structures of solid ice.
However, simulations that include quantum effects, the lengths of the hydrogen bonds are constantly changing due to the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, which tells us that no particle can not have a clear position in relation to the other. This certainly destabilize the network of hydrogen bonds, denying them many of the special properties of water. Explains Philip Salmon, University of Bath in Britain.
But how the water still exists as a network of hydrogen bonds, in contrast to these destabilizing effects of quantum mechanics, was a mystery.
In 2009, the theorist Thomas Markland, from Stanford University and colleagues suggested a reason why the fragile structure of water does not collapse completely. They estimated that the uncertainty principle should also affects the lengths of bonds in each molecule of water, and suggested that in such a way as to enhance the attraction between particles thus preserving the network of hydrogen bonds.
"The water has two random quantum effects that cancel each other," says Markland.
Until recently, however, there was no way to find out if there is no change in the length of the bond in the molecule of water.
Now, the team of Philip Salmon has used the so-called heavy water, whose two normal hydrogen atoms replaced with deuterium. This isotope of hydrogen containing one neutron in its nucleus and a proton. The extra mass makes water less vulnerable to quantum uncertainty. "It's like having half the uncertainty," says Chris Benmore, the Argonne Laboratory in Illinois, who was not involved in the study.
The Salmon and colleagues fired beams of neutrons on different versions of the water, and studied how people sprang - an accurate way to measure the lengths of the bonds. They also replaced the water normal oxygen atoms with heavier atoms, which allowed them to determine what measurement session.
They found that the oxygen-hydrogen bond was slightly higher than the deuterium-oxygen, which is what one would expect if the quantum uncertainty affects the structure of water. "Nobody has ever measured," said Benmore.
We're used to the idea that the physical constants of the universe have been refined for the existence of life. Now it seems that quantum forces of water can be added to this "just right" list.
Source: New Scientist
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