Every literate person knows what a “wonderful” liquid water is!

She allegedly has a strange, but extremely important and useful anomaly FOR LIFE:

As it cools, its density begins to increase, and so this “compaction” process lasts up to a temperature of plus four degrees Celsius. And THEN SUDDENLY, water starts to expand !!! And when it turns into ice at zero degrees, its density is already ten percent LOWER than the usual density of water and it FLOATS at the top.

I remember the science teacher making scary eyes and saying. “Can you imagine, children, WHAT would happen if water didn’t have this wonderful property? Rivers, seas and oceans would freeze to the bottom in winter and life in them would cease!!! And, thanks to this remarkable anomaly in the properties of water, it sinks to the bottom at four degrees and remains unfrozen!”

And this is said and written not only in a book for elementary school students, but also in the most serious school and university textbooks.

In fact, there is no anomaly!

It’s just that the freezing point of the water is set INCORRECTLY, the water starts to freeze at temperatures just below four degrees Celsius.

But its freezing process is TWO-PHASE.

At first, between four and zero degrees in the water, LIQUID ICE CRYSTALS appear and grow quantitatively with decreasing temperature! Their density, like that of solid ice, is 0.9 g/cubic cm!

It is clear that such structures REDUCE the average density of water. As the temperature decreases, they become more and more dense, and the density of such LIQUID WATER decreases more and more, approaching the density of solid crystalline ice.

Finally, at zero and below, the first phase of freezing of water, LIQUID CRYSTAL, passes into the “normal” SOLID CRYSTAL phase!

So, there is no anomaly at all, it’s just that people mistook the beginning of the second phase of freezing water at ZERO DEGREES for the freezing point, although in reality it is located at almost four degrees above zero!

They attributed teleological concern for the existence of life to water!

This inevitably happens to people because of their innate psychological tendency to view the entire world around us as SOMETHING THAT MUST SERVE US and exist only for our benefit!

Forgetting that the world arose and exists by itself, without any worries about life and about two-legged creatures, descendants of cannibals who imagined themselves the center of the universe!

In this note, I am not adding anything new compared to what I have already written before. But, alas, one often has to repeat simple truths in order to knock the anthropocentrism that has become embedded in them out of stupid brains.

25 I 2025