Science of Water : Concepts and Applications

2 The Science of Water: Concepts and Applications
Leonardo da Vinci gave us insight into more of water’s apparent contradictions:
Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter;
Water is sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin;
Water sometimes brings hurt or pestilence, sometimes
health-giving, sometimes poisonous.
Water suffers changes into as many natures as are the
different places through which it passes.
Water, as with the mirror that changes with the color of its object,
so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome,
laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salt, incarnadined, mournful, raging,
angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim.
Water sometimes starts a confl agration, sometimes it extinguishes one.
Water is warm and is cold.
Water carries away or sets down.
Water hollows out or builds up.
Water tears down or establishes.
Water empties or fi lls.
Water raises itself or burrows down.
Water spreads or is still.
Water is the cause at times of life or death, or increase of privation,
nourishes at times and at others does the contrary.
Water, at times has a tang, at times it is without savor.
Water sometimes submerges the valleys with great fl ood.
In time and with water, everything changes.
Water’s contradictions can be summed up by simply stating that though the globe is awash in it,
water is no single thing, but an elemental force that shapes our existence. Leonardo’s last contradiction,
“In time and with water, everything changes,” concerns us most in this text.
Many of Leonardo’s water contradictions are apparent to most observers. But with water there
are other factors that do not necessarily stand out, that are not always so apparent. This is made
clear by the following example—what you see on the surface is not necessarily what lies beneath.
STILL WATER
Consider a river pool, isolated by fl uvial processes and time from the mainstream fl ow. We are
immediately struck by one overwhelming impression: It appears so still … so very still … still
enough to soothe us. The river pool provides a kind of poetic solemnity, if only at the pool’s surface.
No words of peace, no description of silence or motionlessness can convey the perfection of this
place, in this moment stolen out of time.
We ask ourselves, “The water is still, but does the term ‘still’ correctly describe what we are
viewing … is there any other term we can use besides still—is there any other kind of still?”
Yes, of course, we know many ways to characterize still. For sound or noise, ‘still’ can mean
inaudible, noiseless, quiet, or silent. With movement (or lack of movement), still can mean immobile,
inert, motionless, or stationary. At least, this is how the pool appears to the casual visitor on
the surface. The visitor sees no more than water and rocks.
How is the rest of the pool? We know very well that a river pool is more than just a surface. How
does the rest of the pool (for example, the subsurface) fi t the descriptors we tried to use to characterize
its surface? Maybe they fi t, maybe they do not. In time, we will go beneath the surface, through
the liquid mass, to the very bottom of the pool to fi nd out. For now, remember that images retained
from fi rst glances are almost always incorrectly perceived, incorrectly discerned, and never fully
understood.