Shannon Scandiffio 
By Matthew Emmanuel, Jayden Royal and Shannon Scandiffio
FEB 1, 2018
There is a controversial topic trending on social media – people are debating about whether or not water is wet. Many arguments have been published, but is there only one right answer?
On the TheGuardian.com’s Speculative Science page, different theories were posted by their readers. Jacqueline Castles, stated that “water isn’t wet because wetness is a description of our experience of water; what happens to us when we come into contact with water in such a way that it impinges on our state of being”. Ewan Sweeney posted that, “ The reason it feels as it feels when water touches the skin is actually a complex electro-chemical reaction which works at amazing speeds. The sensory inputs are a combination of: Your body’s pH at that moment, the water’s pH, your body’s temperature at that moment, the water’s temperature, the atmospheric pressure and the molecular polarity.”
Students and staff at Saint Thomas Aquinas High School (STA) were interviewed by Raider Review and asked for their opinions on the topic. STA junior Madi Brown stated that water is not wet, because wet is how you perceive the feeling of water on your skin. She demonstrated this by pouring water on a piece of paper and showed how the paper became wet once water was poured on it, and she explained how the paper isn’t physically water just because it is wet. Junior Jaden Davis said that water isn’t wet because “wet” is used to describe an object when it encounters a liquid. He brought up a very good point, by comparing the fact that even though fire burns things, fire itself isn’t burnt, in the same way that although water makes things wet, it isn’t actually wet. On the other hand, STA’s Dean of Students Mr. Biasotti said that water is wet because it is wet in one of its three stages. Dean Biasotti provided a great example by talking about how he needs to wet his face with water in order to shave. He said his face needs to be wet, so in order to do that he must apply water.
The debate was put to rest when the question was finally answered by STA’s Chemistry teacher Mrs. Cirrito, who explained that “ water has a property of forming crystals, that get larger when it freezes. It has the property of being polar, but water itself is not wet, it is the condition of something that is in water… wet does not apply as a property to water.”
In the argument “Is water wet?” water has been aggressively debated whether or not it is wet. Some have stated that objects are wet because the water on it is wet, other have said the object is wet only because the water made it wet but the water itself is not wet. In conclusion, the Raider Review has determined Mrs.Cirrito’s explanation that the debate about whether water is wet is more of a grammatical error. In fact, “wet” is a property of water, but water itself is not wet.
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