From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition,alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: distilled water
Date: 24 Jul 1998 00:51:51 GMT

In <6p8bv9$nvv$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> cjclark@my-dejanews.com writes:

>In article <6p65r4$crf@sjx-ixn4.ix.netcom.com>,
>  sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris) wrote:
>
>>    Pure water's resistance is not infinite.  It does conduct
>> electricity to a slight degree, due to ionic content caused by
>> spontaneous dissociation to H+ and OH- (both at concentrations of
>> almost exactly 10-7 M at 25 C, as any Chem 101 student will tell you).
>
>Too bad the student would be wrong, but it would be a common answer.
>There are no free protons (H+) in water. What do exist are hydronium ions,
>H3O+.
>
>          2 H2O <--> OH- + H3O+
>
> Just thought I'd try to help clear up that common misconception.



   Yes, we all know there are no naked protons in water.  And if the
truth were told, there might not even be any free OH- as we like to
picture it.  Charges like to spread and an OH- is going to be bonded to
at least one other H2O ALL the time, though it may flip from one to
another.

   But H+ is convenient.  Writing H3O+ doesn't add anything.  For all
you know, some of it exists as H2O-H3O+.  In fact, if you count
hydrogen bonding, surely more than 90% of it is.  How strong does a
bond have to be, before you can call it a molecule?

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative,sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Apologies about magnetic water - any physicists or chemists out 
	there care to comment ?
Date: 29 Aug 1999 12:25:03 GMT

In <7q9f4o$l06@dfw-ixnews10.ix.netcom.com> eee@netcom.com (Mark
Thorson) writes:

>A cluster is some number of water molecules held together
>by hydrogen bonding.  A hydrogen bond is a weak intermolecular
>bond joining a hydrogen atom on one molecule with an
>electronegative atom on another molecule (oxygen, in the
>case of water).  Hydrogen bonds are about 5% as strong as
>covalent bonds (such as the intramolecular bonds in the
>water molecule).
>
>Solid ice is fully hydrogen-bonded water.  Estimates of
>the amount of hydrogen bonding in liquid water vary, from
>about 50% at the low end to above 99% at the high end.
>I.e. the difference between solid ice and liquid water
>may involve breaking less than 1% of the hydrogen bonds.


   Ummm, I don't think your large limits are correct.  What holds water
molecules together is almost entirely hydrogen bonding.  100% are
formed when ice freezes and 100% broken when it vaporizes.  So you can
get a very good estimate of how many there are broken when ice melts
(requiring 79 cal/g), by simply seeing how much heat it takes to break
the rest, as water is heated from there to 100 C and then vaporized
(taking, all told, 640 cal/g more, minus 33 cal/g heat capacity for
steam at 100 C, a grand total of 686 cal/g).  By simply looking at the
ratio of heats involved, when you melt ice you bust about 79/686 =
11.5% of the hydrogen bonds.  Heat it to room temp (25 C) and you've
busted 79+25/686 = 15.2% total.  At body temp (37 C) it's 79+37/686 =
17%.  The % bonds intact through the normal drinking-water to body-temp
range is then bascially in the high 80's.   In liquid it does not go
below 100% (1- (79+100)/686)) = 74%.   These numbers are probably a few
percent high, in that van Der Waals forces hold water molecules
together as well, and also more liquid water must store some heat in
molecular rotation, as well as the potential energy of bond breaking.
Still, liquid water has the highest heat capacity of any fluid--3 times
what most others have, so it's reasonable that most of the heat
capacity of liquid water is due to bond breaking.  The numbers above
are then fairly acurate.

   I'll crost post this to sci.chem to see if I can get anything more
specific.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative,sci.skeptic,sci.chemistry
Subject: Re: Apologies about magnetic water - any physicists or chemists out 
	there care to comment ?
Date: 30 Aug 1999 20:52:19 GMT

In <7qc0ah$of7@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com> eee@netcom.com (Mark Thorson)
writes:
>
>In article <7qb8qv$fi1@dfw-ixnews19.ix.netcom.com>,
>Steven B. Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>In <7q9f4o$l06@dfw-ixnews10.ix.netcom.com> eee@netcom.com (Mark
>>Thorson) writes:
>>
>>>Solid ice is fully hydrogen-bonded water.  Estimates of
>>>the amount of hydrogen bonding in liquid water vary, from
>>>about 50% at the low end to above 99% at the high end.
>>>I.e. the difference between solid ice and liquid water
>>>may involve breaking less than 1% of the hydrogen bonds.
>>
>>   Ummm, I don't think your large limits are correct.  What holds water
>>molecules together is almost entirely hydrogen bonding.  100% are
>>formed when ice freezes and 100% broken when it vaporizes.  So you can
>>get a very good estimate of how many there are broken when ice melts
>
>Quoting from "Near-Infrared Studies of the Structure of
>Water", _Journal_of_Chemical_Physics_, volume 39, number 8,
>page 2039:
>
>"The quantities listed in Table III give direct information
>on the number of hydrogen bonds present in water.  Since
>the maximum number of hydrogen bonds is present in ice (100%),
>the number present at a certain temperature is 100 - C0 - 0.5C1.

   And where does this equation come from?


>Thus, we find that in the range 6 degrees to 72 degrees the
>percentage hydrogen bonding decreases from 52% to 39%.  The
>extrapolated Ci values for 0 degrees C are C0 = 0.26,
>C1 = 0.41, C2 = 0.33.  This results in a value of 54% for
>the hydrogen bonds present in water at 0 degrees C.  The
>values derived from earlier experiments by other workers
>vary between about 50% (Cross _et_al_) and nearly 100%
>(Pople).  However, our values agree very closely with
>recent statistical mechanical calculations."

   Recent as in what year (missing from your cite, which I'll bet you
lifted from something else).  The above is either misquoted, or simply
nonsense.  These guys claim that 46% of the hydrogen bonds are broken
in melting, and 61% by the time 72 C is reached.  But it takes 91% as
much heat to do melt ice as it does to reach 72 C, so how come only
15/46 = 33% as many hydrogen bonds are supposedly broken?  The heat
capacity of liquid water is 9R/mole, which is 50% more than is
permitted with individual molecular energy storage alone (not that
anything close to maximal vibration and rotational and translation can
happen maximally in a liquid).  Clearly, the intermolecular storage of
heat as potential energy in water, is huge, and most of it is in
H-bonds, as seen by the vastly reduced heat capacity of H2S liquid.
But 2/3rds of this heat is not going to breaking interamolecular bonds?
Do tell.  Where, then?  And what about that huge heat of vaporization--
where is that heat going?  The article you quote is scientific crap.


>Quoting from "On the Monomer Concentration in Liquid Water",
>_Journal_of_Physical_Chemistry_, volume 69, number 7,
>page 2151:
>
>"The three independent lines of evidence provided by the
>vacuum ultraviolet absorption spectra of water vapor and
>liquid, the semiempirically calculated heat and entropy
>of solution of water monomer in liquid water, and the lack
>of structure at 1.89-1.90 u of the broad 1.90-u band of
>the near-infrared absorption spectrum of liquid water,
>all lead to the same conclusion, namely that the
>concentration of nonhydrogen-bonded water monomer in
>liquid water at temperatures between 0 and 100 degrees
>is less than 1% of the molecules of the liquid."


   And this says only that nearly all molecules have at least one
hydrogen bond in liquid water.  Which doesn't disagree with anything I
said (since the max is 2 per molecule), but does disagree with the
quote just before.  39% at 72 C doesn't leave even one per molecule,
and you haven't even gotten to 100 C yet.

   I'm crossposting this to sci.chemistry.  Follow if you dare.