A water problem

I wondered just how bad I should feel about peeing in the pool while playing with my daughter today. To be clear, I did not pee in the pool. I just wondered to myself about the ethics of the thing.

I remembered seeing a video simulation once of water molecules tearing apart a salt molecule/crystal similar to this one :

Then thought about the volume of water around the spot where I suspected my daughter of peeing in the pool herself and thought, "well it's not pee anymore by now... it's just parts."

That's what dissolving means, after all. Water, using it's vast variation of molecule movements to take apart larger, more vulnerable molecules.

As a semi-germaphobe, that's good information to have when making decisions like whether or not to pee in the pool your family members are swimming in. And, good to know tiny little pieces of "water" are capable of such feats of strength.

Now I attempt blue humor to a degree to introduce that point, but the level of the thinking is an important thing for humanity to get better at going forward in my humble opinion.

It reminds me as well of a smoky conversation back in college after watching some movie about mechanical remote controlled bugs, where one of my friends wondered aloud, "what if they start making mechanical bugs that look like the real thing? You know, to spy on people and poison people and stuff?" To which I reply that they already make those, and have for millions of years. Real life bugs are mechanical expressions of electromagnetic energy.

The process we call chemistry, the bonding of multiple atoms into molecules, compounds, amino acids, life, is really just about electromagnetism. The varying degrees of strengths and combinations of molecules is a terribly minute and delicate study to be sure, but the simple version is that we are all large organisms made up of trillions upon trillions of electromagnetic bonds.

Water is "the universal solvent" because it interacts with everything the way it interacts in this video. Our bodies use an amazing and incredibly crafted forcefield we call our "skin" to limit the scope of water's interaction with our molecules.

This is the range and probable limit of the science portion of the Polymath Enterprise(tm). Although certain projects around the world could open many new doors in the field of physics and sciences. Still, it's comfortable to know we can use the knowledge we have to make ourselves feel better about the world in which we live as well.