By: William Brown, scientist at the Resonance Science Foundation

Water is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe, and has a simple chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. However, this abundant and seemingly simple molecule underlies astonishing properties arising from the peculiar molecular and intermolecular configurations of water. Starting at the molecular configuration where the hydrogen moieties and unbonded electron pairs of the oxygen atom form a tetrahedral molecule: naively, we might assume that the simplest binding arrangement would be a linear molecule, like carbon dioxide (which as a result does not exist as a liquid and goes straight from a solid to a gas via sublimation), however in a water molecule the hydrogen atoms bind to the single oxygen atom with a specific bond angle of 104.5°. This tetrahedral configuration of the water molecule produces a partial electric-dipole, which makes water ionically interactive and...