Talk:Color of water
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[edit] Misconceptions everywhere!
From talking to many people I find that very few know that water is a blue-colored chemical. Even science teachers don't know this, and science textbooks never mention it. Billions of people look right at blue oceans all their lives, but without knowing... that water is a blue substance?! Bizarre! How did this situation come about? --Wjbeaty 08:08, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I visited Crater Lake, which is famous for its intense blue color, and noticed that in their brochure, and in their mounted plaques, their explanation of color does not mention that water is itself a blue substance. They do explain how blue dyes work: absorbing the red/green frequencies. But they avoid saying that water itself is like a blue dye. When I asked one of their staff about this, she became angry over the topic. She stated that nowhere in her training or reading or in literature provided to staff, does any author ever mention that water is a blue-colored substance. (Exactly the problem!) But she concludes that water is transparant, and that I was lying or perhaps insane, rather than accepting that water could be blue, or suspecting that a bizarre problem exists in elementary textbooks' explanation of blue lakes and oceans.
So I guess that the general public thinks that science is determined by voting. If thousands of references say that water is a transparent substance, then any few people who say that water is a blue substance... are wrong by definition? The majority rules, and massed authority must be correct. And that's probably the cause of this strange problem. R. Feynman must have been wrong when he insisted that science was all about distrust of authority. Galileo had to be wrong, since he was just one person. "And yet it moves.")--Wjbeaty 08:08, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Well if that's the case, what is the evidence that you can show to the genral public to prove that a water molecule is slightly blue? After all they drink it and is seems colorless! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.118.23.78 (talk) 14:47, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Old Black Water
The article contains the following statement:
- A few tens of meters of water will absorb all light, so without scattering, all bodies of water would appear black.
But this clearly cannot be true because the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector uses an active volume of (ordinary, not heavy) water that is "33.8 m in diameter and 36.2 m in height" and light can be seen from the center of that cylinder so at least ~16 metres away (and I think the detection scheme expects lightto make it all the way across the volume of the active cylinder).
Does anybody know the actual attenuation of visible light by ultra-pure water?
Atlant 17:28, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Merge proposal
Blue ice (glacial) seems an obvious candidate to become a section of this article, which as it stands does not talk about solid water at all.
--207.176.159.90 (talk) 23:26, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
It's ice, not water. If anything it should be merged with something about ice. I don't support a merger though of the page. Kevin Rutherford 00:43, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
