I'll resolve this once a valid argument is given in the comments
water is made up by molecules, surrounded by and adhering to other water, that's wet.
Yes, and that's a common usage of the term "wet". If we felt like it, we could have a definition of "wet" that only includes other objects' effects from interacting with the water. But that's not how most people use the term, most people also refer to water itself as being "wet".
@GiftedNater Wetness is the ability of a liquid to adhere to the surface of a solid, so when we say that something is wet, we mean that the liquid is sticking to the surface of a material.
Since water by itself is not a material on which it can be adhered and altered by the presence of more water, it is not wet.
@WeatherIsNiceUpHere Well of course liquid water is a material to which it is automatically adhered if we aren’t considering just disjointed aggregates of ~tens of molecules (and a couple molecules of anything isn’t probably okay to call a material, so water won’t be an exception here).
@WeatherIsNiceUpHere Interestingly, sufficiently cold water ice is probably suited to be called dry. Ice of about 0°C though is undeniably wet to me, in most circumstances.
@WeatherIsNiceUpHere so if you pour a bucket of water on my dry tshirt, does the tshirt not become wet, when it was not so before?
@WeatherIsNiceUpHere then rain carries with it some wetness that it uses to make stuff wet.
@Dreamingpast what makes up rain? So that we can identify what exactly possesses the wetness
@WeatherIsNiceUpHere counterexample: if I leave a can of paint out in the rain and it gets water in it, "oh no, my paint got wet :(" is a valid negative exclamation describing the situation, despite the paint still being a liquid
Water is wet because when you touch you, your hand gets wet, like with other things that we consider being wet, or even more so than many of them.
@JimHays Well obviously that’s formalistic language cheating. 😉 “Wet” correlates with pretty basic chemical/physical conditions and is applicable to a wide range of things (fabrics/furs, powders/clays, well-defined surfaces) while “injured” is not (animals and their parts, maybe some other mainly macroscopic living things; other instances covered by metaphoric usage). I think there is even better argument but I can’t seem to nail it yet and this market’s comments is a good place to find it.
Well certainly if you melt dry ice you don't expect to get wet water, do you? You get dry water.
@Boklam when you melt dry ice, you get a lot of CO2, (and sometimes someone gets dead if that happens in a closed space).
When you melt regular, i.e. non-dry ice, you get water.
Your statement is obviously false.
If you touch wet stuff then you often get kind of wet because some of the water on the wet stuff transfers to you. If you touch water then you also often get kind of wet because some of the water on the water transfers to you. Therefore water is wet.
On the other hand, burnt things can't burn you, so fire is not burnt, but water is wet, as in 'consisting of, covered with, or saturated with water or another liquid'.
Let's start with a simple fact we can all agree on: water is wed.
It is wed by that guy in the foreground. And also they are both wed by the guy in the background (but the background guy is not wed, go figure). But neither of them wets water. In fact, no one wets it. In other words, water is not wet by anyone.
The wetness of water is thought to be due to its high moisture content.
— Dr. Jason A. Rush, Department of Mathematics, Edinburgh University
nah that shit aint wet. what is fire burnt? nah, water can make things wet, fire can make things burnt.
@DesTiny you're fighting a losing battle here homes I spent 6.50 that could have went to a charity on this
The use of the term wet as a noun is: liquid that makes something damp.
@Helamanincorporated if i take a dry tshirt with no wetness whatsoever and put water on it, and the tshirt becomes wet, can we say that it is the water which brought the "wetness" to the combined object of tshirt+water? @TJH
@firstuserhere Yes, however you’re COMPLETELY missing the point of the no argument, in-fact I used a synonymous example in my own. Water is what creates wetness, all things that are wet can be dried, therefore if we removed the wetness from water it would simply cease to exist. Water CANNOT be wet.
We can start some vorticity in a lake with a paddle. So, water is not dry.
Water is a fluid - a fluid cannot maintain a shear stress for any length of time. If a shear is applied to a fluid, it will move under the shear. Thicker liquids like honey move less easily than fluids like air or water. The measure of the ease with which a fluid yields is its viscosity. So, whether water is wet or not depends on whether there indeed is an effect of viscosity in water.
Take a cylindrical tank with a hole at the center of the bottom, plugged in like a drain. If you put your hand in the water and give it some circulation, pull it out, and then pull the plug, the rotation soon dies down because of viscosity and the flow becomes irrotational—although still with some circulation around the hole.
If water had no viscosity, then the flow would not die down. A dry water theory leaves out the viscous forces and we can see that viscous forces do indeed exist in water! After all, we can start some vorticity in a lake with a paddle. So, water is wet.
@firstuserhere from feynman lec40: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_40.html#mjx-eqn-EqII409
@TJH if water were dry, then the rate at which it is circulating when the drain plug is pulled would not change, but it does, because of viscous forces, which don't occur in dry fluids
@firstuserhere My issue with this argument is that the term “wet” and “dry” liquids are utilized to describe a fluids viscous properties, not to determine it’s wetness.
Put your hand in water and pull your hand out. It is wet. Put your hand on the wall. The wall is now wet. Put your hand back into the same water it came from, and the the water is not any more wet than it was before. You can not make water more wet, you cannot make water any less wet. With that being said I believe that water can only act upon other bodies not effecting itself. Concluding, water is not wet.
@NikitaSkovoroda This would imply a body of water would be wet, this question is referring to water itself
@TJH a body of water is still water and if a body of water is wet therefore it is logical that water is wet
@TJH Do I not consist of myself? Does my body not include itself? Is not a set the subset of itself?
My biggest argument for "no" is that everyone saying "yes" has cited the intellectual property of others, whereas those arguing "no" have been able to produce their own arguments.
@TylerHuband2834 meaning that actually no one else agrees with that and they have to invent some elaborative weid arguments
@NikitaSkovoroda what makes the citations not "elaborative" and "weird"? For example, George Orwell is an author whose most popular work (1984) is identified as science FICTON, dystopian FICTION, political FICTION. What makes his statement inherently valid just because it is well known?
@TylerHuband2834 "Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty." - Derek Zoolander
The crux of this question is to define wetness. There are a couple of different ways to do this, including “how much a material can absorb liquids,” “to cover with a liquid,” “a liquid that makes something damp,” “involving the use of water,” or “the ability of a liquid to adhere to a solid.”
I think the easiest way to organize these definitions is by how broad these definitions are in terms of necessary elements. The most permissive definitions simply require a quantity of liquid greater than 1 atom, while the least permissive require both a quantity of a liquid as well as another solid.
The other benefit of organizing everything in this way is that it convinces me that wetness, by definition, requires reference of at least a molecule of liquid to something else. Wetness is not possible with a single molecule of water on/involving nothing else.
What does this imply? It implies, at least in my mind, that water itself is not wet. Sure, by some definitions a cup or drop of water might be wet - since something, water in this case, has a liquid on it - but water itself does not on its own have the property of being wet.
Yes. The ocean is wet, a river is wet, a puddle is wet, and the stream coming out of your faucet is wet. If you were to explain to a child that "actually, the ocean is not wet at all!", you would be misleading them, rather badly, both as to the nature of oceans and the nature of our usage of the word 'wet'. While some words change dramatically depending on context, wet is not generally considered one of these; a physicist or engineer might well have specialized terms (e.g., 'wet' as in 'oil-wet'), but unless you specifically specify that you are speaking in a specialized context, water is, in English, in common usage, and for the purposes of spurious prediction markets most especially, wet.
@NathanHuband More arguments for no, when something is wet, it can be dried, removing the “wetness”. If you poured water on a table, it would be wet, however it could be dried with a towel. When we apply this to water, we see that it cannot be wet, if we removed the “wet” it would cease to exist.
"Truisms are true, hold onto that! The solid world exists, it's laws do not change. Stones are hard, Water is wet, objects unsupported fall to the earth center" -George Orwell 1984
@Helamanincorporated Objects unsupported don’t necessarily fall to the earth’s center. You need to be in Earth’s gravity well
Water is not wet because wetness is a property of a surface. When we say something is wet, it means that it has come into contact with a liquid and has absorbed some of it. Water is the liquid that creates the wetness, not the substance that is wet.
@TJH Water is wet, in the sense of being a liquid which flows easily, because its viscosity is low, which is because its molecules are rather loosely joined together. The sensation of wetness is largely due to the cooling caused by evaporation, and water has a rather high latent heat of vaporisation, which is the amount of heat it removes from its surroundings in order to convert liquid water into water vapour.
-John Geake
