• Question: Can you cut water?

    Asked by tobyneilson to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 21 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      If you freeze water then it can be cut quite easily with a hot knife 🙂 In a liquid form you can cut a sheet of water by placing a block in the way of the flow.

      A funny thing you can do with water is.. freeze a block of water, get some fine wire and lay it over the block of ice. Pus a weight on each end and what will happen is that the pressure of the wire on the ice will melt the ice locally but it will refreeze behind it. So if you had this in the freezer it would look like the wire magically travels trough the ice 🙂

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      The bonds between molecules in a liquid are easy to break but easy to make. So as soon as you’ve tried to cut them apart, they’ve bonded back together again.

    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      Liquid water has some fascinating properties, but being able to cut it isn’t one of them 🙁 Dan and Peta have pointed out some really cool experiments you can do!

    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 21 Nov 2011:

      I’m not sure if it really counts as “cutting” but my answer to this would have been yes, you can cut water, even in the liquid sense – when you put your hand in water you could say you are “cutting through” but I guess in reality it’s more of a pushing, but it does resemble the effect of breaking the surface. This is what ships are doing when they sail, or when you swim, it can be like cutting through the water 🙂

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