Looking at Water Through Paradigms

Abstract

Liquid water and its mixtures are used as examples to illustrate the limit of the paradigm of the continuous versus discontinuous description of matter. This is done by going into the details of the modern physical representation of liquids in general and associated liquids in particular. The latter liquids, of which water is the perfect representative, are shown to exhibit local ordering that cannot be described by the current physical theory in a satisfactory way, since these theories are shown to be blind to local order, in the sense that they cannot distinguish ordinary liquids from associated liquids, except by noticing their anomalous properties. The pathway towards a new paradigm is proposed, that bypasses the incoherence of both visions of matter in an unified prospective.