• ninja@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’ve had the ‘can you make water more wet?’ conversation before. The answer we arrived at varies based on the definition of wet so we had to define wet first.

    We concluded that wetness is usually judged by how liquid something is or how much liquid it has with it. Our liquidity was based on viscosity so it’s possible to make a liquid more wet by decreasing viscosity. Viscosity can be altered by adding a different viscosity liquid to it. There are things less viscous than water so in adding them you can make water more wet. Viscosity can also be changed by changing the temperature. As temperature increases viscosity decreases until water becomes a gas and dissipates into the air. We got a bit stuck here since at this point we no longer considered the water to be wet but did think that the air was wet. There was wetness, but since the mix was more air than water the water’s wetness was decreasing. We concluded there was some nebulous level of humidity that would be considered wet, but it would be wet air rather than dry water.

    Then we looked at it the other way. At low temperatures the viscosity of water increases until it eventually crystalizes into a solid. As long as it stayed frozen it had none of the properties we considered wet. Completely frozen water could be considered dry.

    • CheezyWeezle@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Then what about dry ice? That’s frozen carbon dioxide, so it is waterless ice. It is called dry because it lacks any water. Is water ice more or less wet than dry ice?

      • ninja@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The way we thought of it, while frozen it’d be the same amount of dry. It’s called dry ice because it’s dry after it melts.