This is not usually how technology progression works when you see it play out.

More likely, it would be something like a 2% more efficient refrigerator. These advances stack up for a hundred years and build into something that looks like magical future technology.

There were very very few exceptions to this in history.

I had assumed that those were steam bubbles, not air bubbles. At high enough temperatures water becomes a gas. In a boiling pot, the highest temperatures are at the bottom. Temperature fluctuations on the bottom would lead to more steam production in some areas than others.

Any point at the bottom of the pot that did form a steam bubble would immediately lose energy to the steam and cool down. Now we likely are thinking of metal pots in this exercise, and metal conducts heat very well, so that cooled down point in the metal would draw nearby heat from the pan towards it, decreasing the chances of bubbles nearby. This would presumably lead to bubbles forming at some reasonable distance from each other, as any bubble formation causes the nearby pot metal to cool down.

Once in steam form, the steam bubble has a harder time losing energy. The energy was gained through direct contact of water with metal, but steam is much less dense, and it seems like the high-density shell of water around the steam bubble would act more like a mirror - reflecting the kinetic energy back into the bubble. This would keep the bubble stable as it travels up.

That's been my mental model of it for a while. It would be cool if someone who studied this stuff for real opined on it though.

Then, suddenly, at 32F/0C, water's real miracle happens. All the loose molecules click into place with other molecules - well, nearly all, because ice cubes aren't monocrystalline, typically, but those spare unmatched ends of molecules at crystal interfaces are still trapped by their other ends, and any single molecule unable to "find" a match for either strongly attractive end will still be trapped as well into solid-matrix mechanics. At most, those solo unmatched molecules become slight diffaction points for phonons (sound-energy propagation), but they are in fact so rare and so slight that they are generally undetectable. (The crystal faces are made of millions of unmatched molecule ends, and have therefore much more effect.)

Other polar molecules can act similarly, but water is astoundingly smaller than most others - so its molecules "find" their matches more easily, as they don't need to "rotate" much mass to line up - and is much less flexible as a result (so the alignment on the two-molecule level forms a more rigid body than, say, a polar sugar, and the volumetric effect is more pronounced).

If I understand the article correctly, they found a phase transition reaction, a chemical reaction that occurs in liquid water below 0 C that splits the body of liquid water into one continuous region of high density and one of low, so its no longer a uniform liquid.

This would also release heat, like the freezing reaction (and unlike random rearrangements of molecules in the liquid).

Very interesting point though!

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But what are the incentives of those who did those tests? That should be said in the same breath as you say "empirical testing/evidence".

Homeopathy was invented after the discovery of germ theory [1][2]. So not really. And homeopathy has always suffered from an adulteration problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy

A lot of doctors are shoving people out the door based on their first thought inside a short appointment as they type up a prescription.

Homeopathy is ineffective kookery, but our medical system has some well known gaps.

Saying that “less diluted works better” is saying the diametric opposite of what Homeopathic “theory” does!