Context: I was trying to figure out why my coke glass bottle exploded in my freezer.
Update: As it turns out, water is a weird one amongst other liquids.
In: 3
Water is one of very few compounds that expands when it freezes. It expands because the solid crystalline structure has large voids, whereas the liquid form doesn’t.
Water does, in fact, shrink as it cools. However, as it freezes the hydrogen atoms of each molecule want to bond with each other and that forces the molecules to push apart to form those bonds.
Think about it like this: you get a bunch of people and squeeze them closer and closer together. This is the water cooling. Now, in order to form a solid, everyone needs to hold hands. You can imagine that since the people are so close together they need to push apart a little to be able to actually hold hands. This is like the water starting to freeze. As more bonds are made (hand holding) they need to spread further out because their bodies are in the way.
Edit: as u/Saavedroo pointed out below, my analogy here implies the hydrogen bonds with each other instead of with the oxygen. I made a slight edit for more clarity but in hindsight I should have replaced “hold hands” with “place a hand on another’s shoulder.”
Frozen water is a rare material that expands when it freezes. It’s why ice floats. The way the molecules stick together pushes them apart compared to the free floating liquid. Most solids don’t do this.
Plutonium is of the few other substances that behaves in the same way.
When plutonium melts it forms a denser liquid than the solid metal – and plutonium being plutonium this means things could get very exciting indeed as a subcritical block of plutonium metal could become critical simply by melting – shortly after which everything else begins melting.
In fact plutonium is just plain weird – it has six different crystal forms with wildly different densities. Heating and cooling the metal makes it change crystal form – and once again it can go from reasonably safe sub criticality to ruin-your-day criticality just by a temperature change. Nuclear weapons avoid this problem by alloying plutonium with a small amount of gallium, aluminium or indium which prevent it from changing crystal forms.
Water can both expand and shrink in volume when it the freezer, it depends in the pressures. There is multiple ice phases the one that forms at atmospheric pressure is Ice Ih and is ti less dense the liquid water
If you would put water in a container that would deform you would get some ice that form that is less dense and increases the pressure and water that is more than is formed with it get high enough.
Look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg if the water starts to free some Ice Ih is formed. It is less dense then liquid water so it will compress the remaining water a bit.
The idea that water can’t be compressed is not corrected, it is just very hard to compress, At the bottom of the ocean at the Mariana Trench the pressure is 1,086 bar, a bar is practically atmospheric pressure at sea level, and water density has just increased by 5%.
If you look at the phase diagram that is 1kbar, to get water to form IV that denser the liquid water at a temperature just below 0C the pressure needs to be 6000 bar. So you need a container that can handle an internal pressure 6 times the pressure at the bottom of the oceans. The practical result normal containers can handle the pressure and water expands and they deform or crack. You need a container specially made to handle extreme pressure to get ice that is denser the liquid water, so it is extremely rare
Answer: Water is magnetically charged, with positive and negative sides. You can bend falling water with an electric charge.
Warm water has a lot of energy, which is greater than the magnetic force. Cold water will attract itself while hot water won’t.
Even cold water has enough energy for the molecules to have enough energy to not stick magnetically. Once it does have that energy, the magnets take over and form a crystal much larger and stronger than the water before.
Water is like a magic puzzle, if you move the pieces all around they fit in a tiny box and flow, if you let the piece slow down, they will form the picture on their own as be much bigger than the pile of pieces.
Lots of true but kind of off topic answers here, let me try:
You’re dead on about molecules taking up less space when cooling down, but when water freezes, every molecule starts to stack on each other in a regular pattern like Legos. Now, one somewhat unique thing about water is that it has two very strong hydrogen bonds, and two other filled electron orbitals which form four points around the Oxygen, which naturally push away from each other and make a pyramid shape, like a caltrop or a four sided die.
The Oxygen pulls the electrons further away from the hydrogen, so it makes the two hydrogen ‘spikes’ more electrically positive and the two orbitals are electrically negative. When water starts stacking up, it tries to align negative to positive spikes, which can stack a few ways but most commonly as “Ice I” which leaves a lot of space between the atoms that wouldn’t be there if they were all jumbled together in a disorganized liquid. Here’s a diagram: [https://learnbiochemistry.wordpress.com/category/ice-lattice/](https://learnbiochemistry.wordpress.com/category/ice-lattice/)
Molecules in a liquid are moving, molecules in a solid are stationary. For a water molecule, it’s hydrogen loves it’s oxygen, but it also has a past of cheating so it also really is attracted to other water molecules oxygen. Since it can move (as a liquid) it’s constantly getting closer than it should to other molecules oxygens (think of like a rubber band, it can stretch out to get near other oxygens but will be retracted back like a rubber band). Once it becomes a solid, it can no longer move and can’t get closer than it normally should to other oxygens, and the rubber band is no longer being stretched
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