Unsolved Mysteries of Water in Its Liquid and Glass States

Abstract

The following is an edited transcript of the presentation given by H. Eugene Stanley (Boston University), recipient of the MRS 1998 David Turnbull Lectureship, at the 1998 MRS Fall Meeting on December 2,1998, in Boston.I would like to begin with a kind of kitchen experiment that any of you can do. Take your favorite drink. For some, this is ice water (Figure 1). Ask a simple question: “Whatshould this thermometer read?” And think for a minute of the implications of the answer to your question.The title of this talk concerns water in two different states: the liquid State and the glass State. We'll organize this talk around three questions:■ “What is the puzzle of liquid water?”■ “Why do we care about this puzzle?”■ “What do we actually do?”The “we” in this case is a rather large number of individuals. TU focus this talk on very recent work that has been published or at least submitted this year. This work was done in collaboration with M.-C. Bellissent-Funel, S.V. Buldyrev, M. Canpolat, M. Meyer, O. Mishima, M.R. Sadr-Lahijany, A. Scala, and F.W. Starr. It's also based on earlier research a few years back with C.A. Angell, P.G. Debenedetti, A. Geiger, P.H. Poole, S. Sastry, F. Sciortino, and J. Teixeira. Any of these 15 valued collaborators could probably give this talk as well as, if not better than, I will.We will organize the answer to our third and principal question in the following way: First, we will attempt to identify, in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, some interesting clues.