A Water Molecule's Chemical Formula Isn't Really H20

hackwrench writes "According to this article in Physics News Update, a water molecule's chemical formula is really not H2O, at least from the perspective of neutrons and electrons interacting with the molecule for only attoseconds (less than 10-15 seconds). According to new and recent experiments, neutrons and electrons colliding with water for just attoseconds will see a ratio of hydrogen to oxygen of roughly 1.5 to 1, so a more accurate formula for water under these circumstances would be H1.5O."

Comments

Question.

[sporty]

Isn't H1.5O illegal nomenclature? Shouldn't it be 2H30? Mabe cp30?

Re:Question.

[Lady Jazzica]

Mabe cp30?

It can't be that, since water doesn't contain phosphorus.

C3PO:


C

|

C = C - P = O

Re:Question.

[fm6]

To a chemist, maybe. To a physicist there's nothing abusrd about saying "half an oxygen atom" or "50% chance of interacting with an oxygen atom".

Well, I exaggerate. But you got to admit that modern physics is really weird.

Re:Question.

[twiztidlojik]

Actually, the hydrinuim ion, or H3O+, is an H3O. Technically, 2H3O+ would mean two hydronium ions.

Re:Question.

[jx100]

CCCP=0? hmm... I guess the Soviet Union did fall...

Still water!

[trompete]

Well, as long as it's still wet, there's no reason to panic.

Re:H2O, H3O, and OH

[otuz]

The big deal is you'd end up with a glass 125% full of water.

You're not tasting water

[BoomerSooner]

You're tasting the chemicals added to it. Mmmmm.... chemicals.

Can you say WRONG

[MarkusQ]

Bah! The interpretation given this research is absurd. If I invented a new machine to count the legs on cows, and my machine said that typical cows had three legs each, what would we conclude? That we'd been wrong about cows all these years, or that my machine wasn't working quite the way I'd expected it to?

In the present case, a better headline would have been something like "Unexpected effect hides some protons in neutron & electron scattering experements."

-- MarkusQ

Re:Can you say WRONG

[OwnerOfWhinyCat]

Must agree Markus. The cow leg counter is a great example.

The absurdity in the article makes one wonder where we've been getting all that hydrogen from for all these years. We've been cracking H2O with electrolysis and been getting both H's pretty consistently for decades. The experiments that show the PH are pretty solid as well, so it seems a little early to start theorizing that black holes are giving off the extra half a mole of Hydrogen we've been getting out of a mole of water.

The cool part (that they seemed to entirely miss) is that these techniques could be used to confirm/reject models for wave-theory covalent bonding. Maybe that tough little benzene ring is resonant at more than just the electron shell level....

Scientist to struggling chemistry students...

[quandrum]

Just kidding!

No single instant of time

[SpaceLifeForm]

That should be 10^-15 seconds, not 10-15 seconds.

Lower interaction rate, not fewer atoms.

[Christopher Thomas]

The spin in the article is misleading. What's actually happening is that the interaction cross-section between electron and neutron beams and the hydrogen in water (and in things like hexane) is lower than expected relative to the interaction cross-section with oxygen or carbon.

The conjecture about why the phenomenon occurs (entanglement of protons) is interesting, but they're going to need to find a plausible mechanism and confirm that it's happening before we really know what's going on.

Re:water in time

[Creepy Crawler]

And if it was H2O.99999973 , we'd know what CPU they used to count it with....

H-2-WHOA!!

[quinkin]

But that will mess-up up the name of the waterslide in the Simpsons...

H-2-WHOA!

Q.

Re: H2O, H3O, and OH

[Black Parrot]

> The big deal is you'd end up with a glass 125% full of water.

It keeps you from getting bogged down in the half-empty/half-full debate.

Change water all you want

[1nv4d3r]

H-2-0, H-3-0, H-1.5-0 I don't care.

But consider yourselves warned: Leave my caffeine molecule alone!

Be careful

[isn't my name]

See this lengthy thread from years ago.

By my references...

[chriso11]

Actually, an attosecond is 10e-18, not 10e-15. 10e-15s would be a femtosecond (and 10e-12 is a picosecond). Yes, I know that they say an attosecond is 'less than 10e-15sec', but it is misleading.

Re:H2O, H3O, and OH

[jonadab]

> The big deal is you'd end up with a glass 125% full of water.

Ah, but if you take a couple of sips, then you'll have a glass that
is three-quarters full and three-quarters empty. Get another glass
just like it, drink yet a few _more_ sips out of it, until it's
one-quarter full and one-quarter empty, pour them together, and the
glass will be full and not full. You know, the full glass that
cannot be empty is not the true full glass, and all that zen rot.

Wish there was more detail on the experiment

[jgoemat]

This does not mean that water molecules have one and a half hydrogen atoms at all. If you use electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen from a quantity of water, you will get VERY close to twice the number of oxygen atoms as hydrogen. If they gave a little more detail on their experiments it would be helpful to judge what they actually mean.

For instance, if they are just shooting electrons and neutrons at water and counting how many hit hydrogen nuclei and how many hit oxygen nuclei, you would expect a larger number than normal to hit oxygen since the nucleus is larger (three times the protons and neutrons of hydrogen). They do say "25% fewer protons than expected", but they don't say what they expected or why.

Also, did they have the water in a vacuum chamber? If not, there would be dissolved gasses present in the water that their beam could hit as well. I didn't notice any count for Nitrogen so they must not have done it in a glass sitting on a table, but they don't say.

RTFA

[Mt._Honkey]

If you would have RTFA before posting, you would know that they aren't saying that at all.

While the exact details are still being debated by theorists, the researchers' own theoretical considerations suggest the presence of short-lived (sub-femtosecond) entanglement, in which protons in adjacent hydrogen atoms (and possibly the surrounding electrons) are all interlinked in such a way as to change the nature of the scattering results. Realizing that water itself has anomalous properties, the researchers repeated the neutron experiments in other more typical molecules, for instance in benzene (conventionally noted as C6H6). In that case, they found that the neutrons saw a ratio of hydrogen to carbon of 4.5 to 6! Meanwhile, this effect was also confirmed in various hydrogen-containing metals, in a collaboration with Uppsala University in Sweden.

They are saying that maybe at attosecond time scales, maybe the adjacent hydrogen nuclei are entangled in such a way that fewer of them interact with the incoming particle, or something to that effect. To fully understand this probably requires a deeper knowlege of quantum mechanics and more detail than this article provides, but it is not without precident for many particles to behave as one. Check out Bose-Einstein condensates for info on that.

Re:water in time

[macemoneta]

> And if it was H2O.99999973 , we'd know what CPU they used to count it with....

This was a funny, but it's also very true. People forget that the instrumentation used is also subject to error. I once spent a day hunting down a network problem, only to realize that the test equipment was creating the error, not the equipment under test. All the same model equipment from that manufacturer had the flaw, which we proved with test equipment from two other manufacturers.