The Nature of Water

What is water? Mankind has been trying to understand this very useful and humble and precious and chaste substance for millennia. The nature of water, which ancient philosophers explained in a number of ways, was revealed by combining physics, chemistry, geometry, and mechanics; however, experimentation was mostly responsible for the discovery of water composition. Many of its multifaceted properties have been revealed, from water behavior in the liquid, solid, and gas phases at different spatial scales to our perception of water. Even if we now understand quite exactly the nature of water, there is still plenty to learn, starting with the origins of Earth’s water.