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submitted 1 year ago by boborhrongar@lemmy.world to c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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[-] vale@sh.itjust.works 45 points 1 year ago

I'm going to die on this hill that water is not inherently wet (and by extension oil is not inherently oily).

To say that something is wet, it needs two components: water and not water. You can say that a surface is wet because the water can be removed. If you remove water from water it's just less water. You can say that the container that the water is in is wet, but not of the water itself.

The same applies to oil as well.

[-] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 year ago

And I will continue to assail your hill with; wet is a property that water has.

Wet is simply the surface tension balance of a substance. If a fluid sticks to somthing, it is wet. You can wet your brush, yes, but also wet a soldering iron, or wet every surface with superfluid. Wet refers to the conducting of fluid, capillary action, all the effects of surface tension adhering to something.

How wetting a substance is of another substance is usually measured by the angle a droplet makes upon contact. More sticky (adhesive) and less blobby (cohesive) means more wetting. Cohesion being simply self-adhesion means any fluid with surface tension necessarily totally wets itself, otherwise it's a gas. And since water is a cohesive liquid (with a rather strong surface tension), it is by definition wet.