Question: why did the water dance?

Jose Angel Martinez-Gonzalez answered on 4 Mar 2019:

Water dances because it likes to move and interact with other water molecules and their environment. This movement is your way of expressing whether you are comfortable or if you prefer to move to another place and it is something that nature uses.

Molecules of water could move in different ways, that we could call “dance steps”. You could see the basic steps in this image:

And on the other hand, it is like water dancing together. But what happens when many molecules come together, because these rhythms can be chaotic or very conjoined. In a snowflake the movements are like in a Tattoo, all ordered, rhythmic, following a pattern. In a glass with water, it is more similar to the audience of a Justin Bieber concert, all dance at the same pace but each in a slightly different way. Near the stage, everything is more grouped and the more you move away, the more space you have.

Part of my job is to see how these differences are to know where and how water likes to dance to the water. We know what are the basic steps (atomic movements) and we have different devices (spectrometers, spectrophotometers) that help us say, depending on the physical state or the environment as this dance is produced.

We scientists use these different ways of how water works, to create materials that can help us every day. You can see an example of it (as the water dances) in this video: