Water and Air Part 2

The Essence Contained in the Particle?

I gave my students the assignment to find some interesting or intriguing science facts about water or air.  They found some good stuff . . .and also the ideas of atoms and molecules came along in what they brought, and mostly served to confuse them.

One kid found a fact that there are about 1.5 sextillion molecules of water in one drop.  Another found a “fact” that when you feel wind blowing against your skin what you are “really” feeling is the air molecules hitting your skin. Yet another student brought the idea that H₂O is the chemical formula for water because each water molecule is “made of” two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.  I’ve intentionally placed a few things in quotations to indicate my skepticism and disagreement and I’d like to try to explain the bias inherent in these three statements.   They can serve as good-enough examples of how materialism glosses over our understandings to set itself up as the ultimate-objective-knowledge-of-what-is-true.

These three molecule-esque factoids about water demonstrate something about the confusion in our materialistically-infused scientific literature.  I find nothing particularly wrong with the first fact, since it is nothing more than a restatement of the idea of a molecule as an idea.  That idea says, essentially: water (or any substance) is an aggregate of little “pieces of water,” and the smallest possible piece of water is something we will call the molecule.  Fine and well enough.  However, this does not mean that there is any real, physical way to isolate one lone molecule of water.  The molecule is, I repeat, an idea.  That idea says, “keep cutting it smaller until you reach the One Single Water Particle.”  This hypothetical One Single Water Particle is imagined to contain everything within itself that is “Watery-ness.”  This is the idea behind the word “molecule” when we use it.

Of course, we could take this even further: Science textbooks now describe that if you split that One Single Water Particle, then you’ve split the molecule into its constituent parts, its “atoms”. And we could keep going even into the realm of so called “subatomic particles,”but the pattern is already clear, isn’t it?  When one enters the world of molecules, one is entering a world of splitting, of dissection.  This approach to working with matter has in some respects been very powerful, in other respects quite limiting, and in many serious ways very destructive.

So, I have no particular problem with the first statement, that one water drop “contains” so many molecules, except that it amounts to a tautology.  If we choose to treat water as “splittable’ into pieces, then the molecule is the obvious ideal end to that splitting.  It’s self-referential and self-fulfilling, to set out to split up substances into parts, and then to find and count those parts. Can you see that?  It is truly a case of finding exactly what we look for.  I won’t go into the history too much here, but perhaps it would surprise you to know that, far from working in an unbiased fashion as science often purports to be in its rock-solid method, people like Robert Boyle and Issaac Newton assumed that matter could be split into constituent parts . . . and then went about investigating how it could be done!  (They called them corpuscles back then, and they took the idea from ancient Greek philosophers. This fact is often cited as a reason why molecules and atoms are “really real,” since the idea goes back so far. However, this is a misunderstanding of the Greek mind. They considered all kinds of things, including that the world was flat or round and that the universe geocentric and heliocentric. The Greeks had no problem entertaining conflicting and paradoxical “truths” like we do today.)

I must place a line in the sand at the second “fact,” that what you are “really feeling” when you feel wind, is molecules of air hitting your skin.  This “fact” is, in fact, a boldfaced lie.  This is someone trying to get you to see the emperor’s new clothes that aren’t there.  You absolutely do not “feel” molecules hitting your skin.  What you feel is pressure.  Pressure is the primary sensation that we actually feel (and was one of the phenomena that scientists sought to explain through imagining molecules).  This is why materialism running rampant can cause so much damage, because it tries to convince us that the ideas or models can actually be experienced or felt.  But they can’t! Because they are ideas!  The human being can sense pressure, and so pressure is one of the fundamental experiences that one must work with to understand the behavior of air and water.

Now, what about H₂O being “made of” hydrogen and oxygen?  This, too, takes the abstraction of atoms and molecules and obscures the ideas under layers of apparent simplicity.  I’ve previously mentioned that it’s a relatively easy experiment to add some salt to water (because pure water is a poor conductor of electricity), then apply an electric current (for example using a 9 volt battery with a couple of wires) to the water.  You will find that bubbles form at each of the wire ends and rise in the water.  If you capture those bubbles separately in two test tubes, you will find that, if you apply a burning stick to the gas in one test tube, it will *pop* as it quickly combusts (that’s hydrogen).  If you put the same burning stick into the gas in the other test tube, the flame will flare up brighter (that’s oxygen).  If you allow the reaction to continue and continue, you will have less and less water. OK, so we’ve proven that water is “made of hydrogen and oxygen,” right?  Wrong.  This is that sneaking materialistic assumption coming in again, the one that says “if you keeping splitting, you will find the essence.”  What we’ve proven through this experiment is that if we apply an electric current in the way described, water disappears and two gasses appear.  It is a total transformation, and by the way requires salt and electricity to make it happen (the salt is also transformed chemically).  So why don’t we say that water, electricity and salt “can be transformed into” hydrogen, oxygen, salt, and a depleted battery?  Wouldn’t this make just as much sense?  But because of our assumption that matter is the container for all the qualities that make things what they are, we say water is “made of” hydrogen and oxygen, period. 

It’s a subtle point; can you see it?  It’s a conflation of our common notions of “what things are made of” with “what their essence is”.  We are too loose and imprecise in our words and their meaning, and this is also a side-effect of materialism.  We are uncomfortable with speaking about transformational processes as just as much a “part of” what a substance “is” as what we think of as matter.

What if “what water is” in its essence was inseparable from ”what water does”?  What if the moment you took water out of the air, stream, lake or river where it lived, removed all life forms living in it (as there inevitably would be), removed all the dissolved minerals (as there inevitably would be), bottled it in a test tube and then performed experiments on it, you were already ignoring the entire context in which water exists?  This is the holistic critique of the materialistic approach to all substances.  You can’t, in fact, make a universal theory of everything when your “everything” is only abstract particles because you’ve cut everything else out of the picture.

I want to be clear:  I’m not arguing against the usefulness of the ideas of atoms and molecules in certain contexts.   Yet they are and always will remain, ideas or models, limited in their application by the imagination of their proponents and the context of their creation. Molecular ideas come in handy when you are mixing chemical substances and want to be able to predict the mass of the reactants and that of the products (although even then lots of other factors come into play). Molecular ideas provide some context for some of the behavior of water (such as the idea that water molecules are imagined to be “polar,” i.e. that water is affected by nearby electrically charged things).  But molecular ideas do not “explain or describe water’s essence”

Because we are molecule-obsessed, we are trying to convince ourselves that “everything that water is and does” can be explained by the formula: H₂O.  This is patently ridiculous although I observe that most people swallow this understanding uncritically.  Water, that most essential of life-giving substances, must be understood as it lives, moves and has its being in the ocean, lakes, aquifers, polar ice caps and clouds, and in all living things, including us.  Water is inseparable from its context and its behavior in nature.  The same can be said for air, and for everything else that we study.  This does not mean that we can’t take water out of those places and do experiments on it.  But those experiments and their findings should not be overblown in their importance, nor swapped out for and elevated over our actual lived reality in a tricky slight-of-hand.

We could inject a healthy dose of humility and care into our language, especially our language about science, and stop speaking about atoms and molecules as what the author Owen Barfield calls “psuedo-phenomenal entities”.  We can realize that atoms and molecules are only models, only one kind of lens, one kind of imagination that we can apply. And molecule-thinking has no priority over other kinds of imaginations for water, other than the fact that it is currently the way of thinking so much in fashion that it amounts to dogma. Let’s try to think for ourselves, shall we?

Photo credit: Akira Hojo on Unsplash