Ingenious : Richard Saykally - Issue 25 : Water
▻http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/ingenious-richard-saykally
Donning his regular work attire—jeans and a Hawaiian shirt—Richard Saykally tells me in four words the answer to a question I had often pondered in the shower: Why is water wet? “Strong tetrahedral hydrogen bonding,” he said. The reply didn’t provide the instant illumination I was hoping for, but then, water is not simple. Saykally’s research group at the University of California, Berkeley (where he is a professor of chemistry) studies water with an exotic-sounding list of apparatuses, including cavity ringdown spectroscopes, terahertz lasers, and supersonic beams. His goal is to develop a “universal water force field,” a computer model of water that could predict the behavior of water in any circumstance, down to the atomic scale. I was properly impressed by this ambition, but not (...)
