ORIGINAL BLUEPRINT

New Water or Original Blueprint Tiny quantities of water are different thanks to quantum mechanics Water’s strange and life-giving qualities could be at least partly explained by quantum mechanics.

That is the claim being made by a group of physicists in the UK and the US, who have made extremely sensitive measurements of the protons in tiny samples of water and have found that these protons behave very differently to those in much larger sample.
For example, the fact that it is less dense as a solid than as a liquid and that its maximum density occurs at 4 °C, means that lakes freeze from the top-down rather than the bottom-up — something that was vital to sustaining life during ice ages.
In the latest work, George Reiter of the University of Houston and colleagues study in detail the key to water’s unusual properties — the hydrogen bond.
This is the bond between water molecules, connecting the oxygen atom of one molecule to the hydrogen atom in another.
Hydrogen bonds are usually considered primarily as an electrostatic phenomena, in other words that water consists of discrete molecules bound to one another through positive and negative charges (residing on the hydrogen and oxygen atoms respectively).
This simple picture is able to explain some of water’s features, such as its structure — the predictions of the model agreeing well with the results of neutron-scattering experiments that reveal how far apart on average one oxygen atom is from the next.
Poor proton predictions What Reiter and team have found, however, is that this electrostatic model cannot be used to predict the energies of individual protons within water molecules.
They came to this conclusion after confining water inside 1.6 nm-diameter carbon nanotubes and then exposing these nanotubes to high-energy neutrons from the ISIS neutron source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK.
The neutrons’ high energy meant that they bounced off the protons within the water before the deflected protons had a chance to interact with their surroundings, so by recording the energy distribution of the outgoing neutrons the researchers were able to obtain a direct measurement of the momentum distribution and kinetic energy of the protons.
They found that the momentum distribution of the protons was strongly temperature dependent, with as much as 50% more kinetic energy than the electrostatic model predicts at low temperatures and 20% more kinetic energy at room temperature.

In this way the hydrogen bonds form what is known as a “connected electronic network” and they speculate that it is the response of the network to confinement that causes the large changes in proton energy.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/18093