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One of the themes of The Sacred Balance is that we humans still have a lot to learn about the natural world. In Episode Two of the TV Series David Suzuki meets Dr. Richard Saykally on the shore of Lake Mead (just outside Las Vegas, Nevada) to discuss how little we know about one of most common substances: water. In addition to the broadcast portions of David's interview, here is more of what Richard Saykally had to say: |
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Richard Saykally on the difficulty of justifying his research specialty to his family: "My mother still can't understand why I want to spend my life studying water while other people are curing cancer and discovering new drugs and inventing new kinds of computers, and her son is studying water. And I think that just reflects the idea that water is so familiar to everybody that they just can't believe there is something we don't know about it. This is what my mother asks me all the time: what can we possibly not know about water? But from the point of view of a physicist the answer is a whole lot." |
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Richard Saykally on how the structure of the water molecule gives it special properties: "Every water molecule likes to interact with four other water molecules via this hydrogen bonding interaction. The way I like to think about it, it's like water has two hands and two feet. The hands of water are the hydrogen's that are more or less positively charged, and the feet are electron pairs that are the negative part associated with oxygen. And these two hands want to grab the feet of two other water molecules, and the two feet want to interact with the hands of two other water molecules. So in each water molecule, hydrogen bonds to four others, making very extensive networks in the liquid." |
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Richard Saykally on why all life on Earth needs water: "Probably because life on Earth evolved in water according to the best thinking of the day, and therefore from the beginning life has been based on water. It is possible that life somewhere else may be based on a different substance, but life as we know it here began in water, evolved in water, and is therefore totally dependent on water." |
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Richard Saykally on why it is important to try to understand the nature of water: "It's the big picture that has motivated [our study] from the start, the big picture being the nature of liquid and solid water and how liquid and solid water interact with biological systems, geological systems, astrophysical systems .... At present we don't have a good enough understanding of water itself to be able to understand it in those contexts. Our approach was to, rather than take the same approach that many people have used over the years, namely studying these systems as a whole, we wanted to start with the very small aspects of it and build up the liquid one step at a time and try to understand all of the details from that microscopic point of view. But the big picture has been the motivating factor from the beginning." |
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