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To: Telepathic Intruder

Amen.

Dihydrogen monoxide is probably the oddest substance in the universe. A universal solvent and catalyst, its solid form is actually less dense than its liquid form, which is totally bizarre. Without that characteristic ice would not float and water-under-ice worlds like Europa could not exist, nor could life in Earth’s oceans during its snowball cycles.

And it’s all due to something called the van der Waals force, which is a total hack. It puts the hydrogen ions at 104.5 degrees instead of the expected 180 degrees due to their mutual repulsion, allowing water to float and crystalize all those marvelous snowflakes in beautiful six-sided symmetry. It also makes proteins and other organics fold just right to create all of those wonderfully complex structures like enzymes, DNA, and people.

There is still no complete theoretical quantum mechanical model for why the van der Waals force works like it does (in physics textbooks it usually gets handwaved away as a complex side effect of the electroweak force).

It’s a beautiful hack though.


8 posted on 12/18/2014 10:26:40 AM PST by Gideon7
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To: Gideon7

The Pauli exclusion principal. There are so many forces in the universe that I begin to lose track of it all. God made it one of causality, however. I can actually explain how spiral galaxies get their lanes. It’s because of gravitational density, similar to stop-and-go zones on a freeway. The spiral lanes rotate slower than the stars do, our sun having passed through many of them in its history. It’s been simulated in supercomputers.


9 posted on 12/18/2014 10:35:12 AM PST by Telepathic Intruder (The only thing the Left has learned from the failures of socialism is not to call it that)
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