Is Water Wet?

Anonymous

High School Student

February 2023

The most mysterious and controversial question known to man: Is Water Wet? For the average person, an argument for how water is not wet would seem almost unfathomable. However, recently this trivial topic has become widely debated on the internet. Both sides contain aspects of logical reasoning, but which one is actually correct?

Generally, when someone argues that water is not wet, they claim that water makes things wet, not that it is wet itself. In fact, the top definition for wet on Dictionary.com is “moistened, covered or soaked with water or some other liquid.” However, if you look at a molecular level, each individual water molecule is covered by millions of other water molecules, so doesn’t that make that individual water molecule wet? You could do the exact same thing for every other molecule in the vicinity, and they will all have the same results, meaning each individual water molecule is wet, unless it is the only one present. So, it could be argued that water is wet because it is surrounded by more water, but even this argument becomes irrelevant when the entirety of the water is referred to as a unit.

Another interesting point to bring up is the way scientists measure wetness. The way it is measured is by weighing an object and waiting for it to dry, then weighing it again. This supports the idea that wetness is the amount of water that is in/on a solid object. Although this may be true, measuring the wetness of water completely destroys this argument. If the wetness of water is officially measured, then all of it will evaporate eventually, and it will lose the entirety of its weight, meaning that water is one-hundred percent wet. This means that when it is defined scientifically, there is nothing more wet than water.

This brings up the topic of “wet water,” a liquid used by firefighters where they add chemicals to water to decrease the surface tension, and increase how much it spreads. This would identify wetness as the inverse of viscosity. That means that because water has a significantly low viscosity, it would also have a high amount of wetness, which is also supported by the fact that “watery” is an antonym for “viscous” on Theaurus.com. Although this would also identify saltwater as being wetter than regular water, it still clearly shows water being a wet substance.

The last topic that must be noted is the way some describe wetness as the sensation experienced when touching a liquid, whether it is submerging a body part into a liquid or even just touching a wet surface. Either way, water would be considered wet based on this standard. However, a counter-argument to this notion has arisen, stating that when water is not moving, it can no longer be creating the same sensation. Although this concept is true in theory, the only way to actually accomplish it is to remove any kinetic energy from the individual molecules, which is solely achievable by reaching absolute zero, which is still only a theoretical scientific concept because it is extraordinarily difficult to remove all energy from particles, especially with external forces, such as gravity, acting upon them, creating potential energy. So, unless one finds a way to , water would still give a minimalized sensation, because there will still be colliding particles.

This article was originally planned as an essay presenting both sides of this argument as equally correct and leaving the answer up to the reader, but researching the topic led to overwhelming evidence that water must be wet. Even though the arguments that water is dry make some sense at first glance, when studying the real scientific properties, there is not even an argument. The final answer is: water is most definitely wet.