the.com/surface tension
Water's skin, held together by molecules too polite to let go of each other.
means The property of a liquid's surface that lets it act like a stretched elastic film, caused by molecules at the surface clinging to each other more than to the air above.
from A 19th-century scientific compound built from 'surface' (Latin super- 'above' + facies 'face, form') and 'tension' (Latin tensio, from tendere 'to stretch'). The phenomenon itself was puzzled over since antiquity — why water beads up, why a needle can float — but it entered the vocabulary of physics as scientists like Thomas Young and Pierre-Simon Laplace worked out the mathematics of liquid surfaces in the early 1800s, giving the old mystery a precise, stretchy-sounding name.
- cause
- edge molecules bond sideways, missing pulls from above
- result
- lets insects walk on water uninvited
- champion
- mercury beats water, bonds harder with itself
- breaker
- soap wrecks it by sneaking between molecules