• Question: why is water wet

    Asked by beckyđź’— to Chris, Sarah on 17 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 17 Nov 2017:

      Soz I didn’t answer this in the chat, and its actually a curveball answer! Water is not wet! Wetness is only a description of our experience of water and what happens to us when we come into contact with it! Saying water is wet is like saying that wood is hard or fire is hot. Nerves on our hands send information about the water to our brain which processes it. A combination of temperature, pressure and the way water moves tells our brain that water is wet.

    • Photo: Sarah Guerin

      Sarah Guerin answered on 17 Nov 2017:

      Water (and all liquid) is wet because of how the water molecules interact with each other. In ice, the molecules are really tightly packed, and this makes them a solid. In steam the molecules don’t care about each other at all, and spread out into a gas. In liquid water, the molecules are somewhere in between these two states- they stay attached to each other, but they can move around each other lots to fill containers and flow down waterfalls and such 🙂

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