One day, frustrated after
many hours of meditation and practice, Bruce Lee, still a teenager, went
sailing. His martial arts teacher, Yip Man, had been instructing Lee in the art
of detachment, a key facet of gung fu. Lee couldn’t let go. “On the sea I
thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water!”
he later wrote. “Right then—at that moment—a thought suddenly struck me; was
not this water the very essence of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer
hurt. I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This
water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the
smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest
substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.”
For Lee, the budding martial
artist, water embodied an ideal of lithe and effortless strength. He learned
this from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and updated it,
adding, “When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power
to split the earth itself.” It’s striking that water can illustrate and
elucidate a martial arts philosophy while also being, to this day, the “least
understood material on Earth,” as researchers reported recently.
In their study published last
month, Hajime Tanaka, John Russo, and Kenji Akahane—all researchers in the
Department of Fundamental Engineering at the University of Tokyo, in
Japan—tried to tease apart what makes water unique among liquids. It’s got
anomalous properties, like expanding when cooled below 40 degrees Fahrenheit,
which explains why lakes freeze downward, from top to bottom, rather than up.
Normally frozen solids are more dense than their liquid equivalents, which would
mean that frozen chunks would fall to the bottom of a lake instead of staying
on top. Water also becomes less viscous compared to other liquids when
compressed, and has an uncanny level of surface tension, allowing beings light
enough, like insects, to walk or stand atop it. Since it’s these distinctive
features among others that power our climate and ecosystems, water can appear
to be “fine-tuned” for life.
(nautilus)
