gotdamn

downpunxx@fedia.io to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1186 points –
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It threw me at first too. Helps to think of it as wetness being an interaction between a liquid and solid. Water makes things wet, it isn’t itself wet.

So only solids can be wet?

You’d have to ask a physicist. I would be surprised if you couldn’t make other liquids “wet”. The solid analogy helps with conceptualising an interface, one material on another. I suppose you could make water wet, by freezing a block and then splashing said block with water but that doesn’t equate to it being wet itself, if that makes sense.

Wetting is a rather complex topic. Basically, yes.

Not all solids can be wetted. Wax, for example: water beads up on a waxed surface; it does not actually wet the surface.

Not all "wetting" involves water. Soldering and brazing involve "wetting" base materials with a molten filler metal. Dripping molten metal on the base material does not necessarily "wet" it either: the molten filler can "bead" just like water on wax. When it solidifies, the filler metal is not bonded to the unwetted base metal.

wet containing moisture or volatile components

Water is wet. The fact that this is an argument is ridiculous.

This describes very specifically how water makes other things wet. Nowhere, does it describe water making itself wet, because it can’t. Wetness is a property that water can only give to other things, not to itself.