When water molicules have space between them, you have steam…a gas, not a liquid. If there are no droplets of liquid within the steam, it is said to be dry. So no, individual water molicules are not wet.
If that is the case, then what is the most minute amount of water that could be detected by humans.
Nonsense. We only need to define what “wet” means, and compare the effects of one molecule of water to that definition. I would define “wet” as being the characteristic that water behaves like a fluid continuum and acts as a weakly polar solvent, which is really just a more formal way of stating what Staggerlee and Pygmy Rugger have already said. Since one molecule is discrete, it can’t be considered a continuum or treated like a fluid, and while technically it will “dissolve” another molecule out of a substance, for all practical matters one molecule of water isn’t going to be noticed. In fact, if we arbitrarily define a drop of water to be on the order of 1 gram, it’s going to take sextillions of water molecules all bonded together to make something noticibly wet.
So no, one molecule of water isn’t “wet”. “Wet”, in a practical sense, is where you can see or feel a fluid continuum of water.
Stranger
Is there a measure of wetness?
Whoosh!
Civil and environmental engineers measure soil moisture content or soil wetness. Beyond that, “wetness” doesn’t really have a specific technical meaning or metric, although we can talk about the properties relating to viscosity, electrical or thermal conductivity, rate of evaporation, ionization, acidity, and other phenomena associated with water and contaminants therein.
Urk?
Stranger
If a water molecule falls in the forest and nobody’s around, does it make a splash?
I’ve been humming that song the whole thread, hoping it wasn’t referenced.
Don’t you mean “sploosh”?
I’d say at least 30.