H2O

H2O is the uncontested basis of life on Earth, possibly in the universe.  Science describes it by chemical symbols for hydrogen and oxygen, which are its essential parts.  Special bonding provides further physical properties described by valence and state under various conditions of pressure and temperature.

Yes, H2O is water, but only by an effort of translation, like most of science.  Water is something that shows itself variously in brooks, lakes, seas, icebergs, cool drinks, hot coffee, washing bodies or vegetables or automobiles.  Water is what people know, just as the ancients and early man knew it, a slippery and mysterious substance, powerful and weak at the same time, essential and dangerous.

H20 has a different beauty than water.  The aesthetics involved require elegance of mathematical equations and a difficult but rewarding rational and intellectual perspective.  It is not the same beauty as the waves on the shore or storm clouds building on the horizon.  But it is just as real.

That is perhaps why there is a significant disconnect between H2O and water.  H2O, after all, is a chemical, an artificial description of something with real presence in the world.  A glass of water and a glass of H2O may be the same, but carry massively different connotations for most people. 

Consider, then, H2O as the chemical of life.  The universal solvent that can suspend salt as ions, or dissolve other salts.  The power that can push boulders, or erode canyons.  What humans are mostly made of, and the primary consideration  in environmental decisions.  Not too much, not too little, not too hot, not too cold _ the liquid state is necessary.  In science, this is all tied into all the other elements and chemicals and the physics of the universe and the harmony of all is quite profound.

But, H2O is not quite what folks dream of when thirsty, nor seek when dirty, nor long to plunge into when hot.  It can, therefore, represent the complex contradictions and overlays that so confuse modern thought.  Science is a wonderful and powerful thing, but even so it remains somehow separated from the daily experiences of consciousness.

-

My education in the fifties and sixties tended to make me a science guy, for back then the united states believed that hard physical knowledge would be the key to preserving a non-totalitarian world.  Most of the time, it was easier for me to understand the beauty and meaning of H2O than of water.  Chemical equations and repeatable test tube experiments were the only important truths available.

 

Part of the upheavals of the late sixties and seventies was a reaction to that world outlook, which I think was at least partially responsible for wars like Vietnam which we thought could be organized as easily and rationally as Hydrogen and Oxygen.  The counter-culture was an opposition to seeing everything as variations on H2O, and rediscovered water.  I found water in art, in the beauty of seas and waterfalls, which had nothing at all to do with valence properties.  I added my chorus to those who saw clean water as an important human heritage,  and reclaimed our waterways and lakes as more than vast sinks for the universal solvent and its loads of industrial pollution.  It was a different way of thinking.

Maturity has brought me the opportunity to consider both, which gives both complementary and contradictory outlooks and overlays of knowledge and experience.  I understand the beauties of chemical analysis, the clean charts of what H2O can and cannot do,  the magical way it fits into the rest of the scientifically known universe.  But also the equivalent wonder of clouds, and a warm shower, and a cooling iced tea. 

I think those who tell us to simplify our lives are wrong.  We were never meant to be monomaniacal specialists of one point of view.  Even the ancient hunter or skin-scraper would think many thoughts and have many experiences while performing a main task.  We need to know about H2O, when it is necessary and appropriate, but also to revere water, which is everything to our existence.

-

Mathematic model H2O

So different than what we know
As water, complex and serene

Covalent bonds which come and go

Dissolving  salt in eon flow
We watch, not sure of what we’ve seen

Clouds or ice or steam and snow

Waves reflecting sunshine glow
Here and gone as soon as been

Praise for science to find it so

Tell us why and how, although
It’s really water that we mean.

 

 -

You are no doubt one of the modern crowd.  You want food organic and chemical free.  You cringe from fabrics which are not natural.  You fear fumes in the air, tastes in the water, stains in the environment.  And, to some extent, you consider yourself both practical and righteous for doing so.

That is a new thing, of course.  In the fifties chemical concoctions were ranked as major achievements _ clothing made from polyester, plastic Tupperware, food that did not spoil immediately.  Everything modern was modern because it concerned the new chemical wizardry.  Since that was so recently so, it is hard not to believe the current aversion to everything chemical is not simply a fad.

After all, you are nothing but a bag of chemicals, starting with H2O.  Everything you contact and do concerns chemicals, even down to the chemicals firing neurons in your brain so you can think.  To ignore and fear chemicals is to ignore and fear yourself.  People who claim to be eating “chemical free” are simply ignorant and dumb.

Yet, worry about modern chemicals is meaningful.  An excess of anything is a problem, and there is no doubt that for several decades chemicals were far too casually used in massive quantities for everything.  But if you retain ignorance about the real role of chemicals in your life, you are simply prey to anyone who comes along claiming anything.  You will end up poorer, and probably sicker.   So when someone tells you about chemical evil, think a little, research a little, and then try to make a more informed judgment rather than the easy knee-jerk response.  After all, even that knee-jerk involved the chemicals dissolved in the H2O that is really you.

-

Superficially, the ability to turn H2O into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity, and to turn them back to H2O generating energy seems a bedrock indicator of our scientific understanding and control of the universe.   After all, it ends of eons of conjecture about the nature of things, the four elements, the mysteries of ether, the alchemical dream.  Everything modern would seem to be described in the simple fact of our physical mastery, and its complex but complete relation to everything else we can discover in the physical universe.

There is certainly something comforting in knowing we can reconstruct at so basic a level.  No matter how polluted a bit of H2O may be with other chemicals, by means of a simple and straightforward procedure we can make it absolutely pure, even in cases where simple evaporation and filtration would fail.  It gives us a kind of fallback hope that things can not be all that bad if we can do something so marvelous at will.  And yet, that hope is really from the standpoint of our very existence, an illusion.
 

Water (not as H2O but as our commonly encountered life requirement) is everywhere and abundant on Earth, necessary for us to survive.  It resides in streams and oceans and the air and our cells and the lifeblood of all plants and animals.
 

The quantities  of water required  for our existence are far too vast to be decomposed into elements and reconstituted.  The systems of weather and circulation and ecological pattern are far too chaotic and complex to be controlled.  If we lose our water, we will lose ourselves, we will become extinct, along with most of the rest of what we treasure on this planet.  The knowledge that water is “really” H2O could become totally irrelevant and useless.
 

Our hubris makes us think we can fix anything and reverse and process.  That is especially true if we have scientifically dissected bits and pieces of the puzzle.  We think, “oh, anything left is just a matter of scale.  We can figure out how to do that.”  But we can’t.  We are locked in a dream of science that is not real, a dream founded on the dance of electrons and models of H2O, when we must wake up each day for a drink of water,  and be immersed in the rest of the complex hydrosphere where we evolved.

- 

Now, when I was young and first learning chemistry,  a long time ago, the way atoms moved was almost romantic.  Water, for example, was Mr. Oxygen and the Hydrogen twins, a relatively sedate plump gentleman around whom whirled the two flirty and frivolous thin girls (I said it was a long time ago, way before there was political correctness or women’s liberation and anyway, my mind was free and pure.)

Mr. Oxygen would go about his business and the twins just tagged along sometimes here, sometimes there tied by electrons that were kind of like ongoing conversations between them.  The conversations, according to Heisenberg were unpredictable, and this certainly conformed to my knowledge of twins, or, for that matter, girls in general.  If it got very cold, they slowed down and crawled under blankets and turned to ice, and if it was extremely warm, they would rush about on bicycles to get the breeze, becoming steam.  It was all neat, tidy, and certain.  The rest of the elements interacted simlarly, but it was H2O where everything made a kind of absolute sense.

Now, of course, nothing makes absolute sense.  Mr. Oxygen is a complex guy, composed of indeterminate particles and energy clumps, some of which might be here now or anywhere at all in the universe either in the next moment or simultaneously.  Like me, as I age, he is not quite all there.  The twins are all over the place, and exchange freely with other Hydrogen women, trading places throughout the mix, and in fact acting more like swingers than the sedate innocent things I once visualized.  And, in fact, nothing might be there at all and it might only be our illusion of the strings in the substrate matrix that provided the model of the periodic table in the first place.

So easily do hard facts, and imagined models constructed to fit the patterns, slip into metaphysics and a certainty that I could understand the universe.  When I was young,  those many eons ago, I was certain and sure, not only of chemistry but of everything else, and all the world made sense and was perfectly obvious, and anyone who did not see that (and agree with me) was either stubborn or stupid.  Now I have graduated to being stubborn and stupid myself, and I am not certain of anything at all, nor of the use of fables and imaginings in figuring out life. 

So I ruefully let the image of Mr. Oxygen and the Hydrogen twins slip away, like memories of the other picture books I loved as a child, and realize that the world is a complex and unknowable place.  As my parents and the other adults always knew, but as I, like all children, had to discover for myself.

-

 

H2O could represent our symbolic and rational model of the physical universe, elegantly based on mathematical precision and confirmed by exact experimentation.  As such, it is an immense and proud achievement for the human species.  Not only is chemistry invoked, but it also stands at the cusp of our understanding of elements, and the particles of which they are composed, of how energy relates to mass and how energy itself may be chemically applied or generated in the form of convertible electricity or heat or light. 

Beyond that H2O begins he basis of our conception of the universe, cosmic time and the unfolding of stars, deep space and the elements of which stars and planets are composed.  It is at the center of biological investigation, including the evolutionary trails and connections that place us firmly into the ecology of the Earth.  There is little limit to the wonder such contemplation can provoke.

And yet, for all that, H2O is incomplete.  It is not yet water.  It is not yet liquid as we know liquid, cool or moist as we know cool and moist, gentle or agitated or serene as we attribute to rain or stormy seas, or lakes.  There are vast elements of the human experience that deal with water, that depend on various concepts of water _ aesthetic, practical, daily _ that have absolutely nothing to do with chemical composition and everything to do with culture.  We know water as other animals do, as our pre-scientific ancestors did.  We still encounter water, mostly, as we go about our lives and without water we would be less than we are.

This simply illustrates the danger we encounter in specialization.  We are wrong to think that by naming a thing we know the thing, that by mapping a model we trap the reality.  The reality of human experience is water, and our reaction to water, and our interaction with water.  Whatever our rational minds may tell us, whatever our machines may be capable of doing, water is usually more relevant to our being than the flat label of H2O.

 -