[thedoc (OP)]

Stephanie Arnold asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Can water be paralyzed in liquid form? From there, could it be stable enough to build with, or molded into a structure that could be experimented on?

How does water conduct sound in comparison to other materials? If a perfectly round room could be constructed out of entirely water, and a sound was released into it, would it echo longer and louder than a room made out of rock or metal?

What do you think?

[chiralSPO]

If I understand "paralyzed" correctly as "immobilized," I don't think it is possible to make pure water solid while keeping it as a liquid. If we allow for mixed phases though, a gel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel) can hold its shape more like a solid would, but still allow the water molecules some freedom to move around within the form.

As for the spherical room with water walls: perhaps a large bubble rising through a very tall (deep) body of water might suffice for the thought experiment? My guess is that metal would reflect more of the sound than water would, but perhaps one of the engineers here would like to comment...

[dlorde]

Solid water - isn't that what ice is?

A solid liquid is rather contradictory, unless you're dealing with special cases, like thixotropic liquids, or liquid crystals.

[evan_au]

A solid liquid is rather contradictory

One example of a solid liquid is glass. This is formed by cooling a liquid so quickly that the molecular structure of the liquid is maintained even below the melting point.

Glasses are not restricted to transparent SiO₂ windows - you can form metal glasses by spraying molten metal onto a spinning wheel cooled by water, resulting in temperature change of millions of degrees per second (but obviously, for much less than a second!).

There are some thermodynamic conditions required to form a glass (which maybe someone else can explain). But I have heard that when you supercool water, it remains liquid - until you insert an ice crystal as a "seed", in which case it rapidly crystallizes. So I assume this means that water does not form a glass(?)

See 3 minute video:

[CliffordK]

Does Jello count?  And you don't really need that much gelatin to make it, so it is "mostly water".

As far as ice, there are many different forms of ice including a couple of types of Amorphous Ice which would somewhat resemble a glass form of ice. 

The Amorphous ice may require high pressures and cold temperatures, or flash freezing to form.  I'm not seeing notes on its stability once formed, but perhaps it would be reasonably stable up to 0°C.

[dlorde]

A solid liquid is rather contradictory

One example of a solid liquid is glass. This is formed by cooling a liquid so quickly that the molecular structure of the liquid is maintained even below the melting point.

Glasses are not restricted to transparent SiO₂ windows - you can form metal glasses by spraying molten metal onto a spinning wheel cooled by water, resulting in temperature change of millions of degrees per second (but obviously, for much less than a second!).

There are some thermodynamic conditions required to form a glass (which maybe someone else can explain). But I have heard that when you supercool water, it remains liquid - until you insert an ice crystal as a "seed", in which case it rapidly crystallizes. So I assume this means that water does not form a glass(?)

See 3 minute video:

Oh, OK; in that case I suppose pitch could be called a solid liquid, although strictly it is an extremely viscous liquid. I was thinking of 'solid' as the state where the atoms or molecules are bound in a lattice structure - I'm not sure where glass fits in that model, although apparently glass doesn't flow like a liquid.

Real life always seems to turn out more complicated than they teach you in school!  [:I]

[lightarrow]

I don't have an answer, but I think we could reformulate the OP question in this way: is it possible to increase the water's viscosity up to a very high degree?

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[lightarrow]

Or she wants a way to make liquid water as "plasmable" and "blockable" as a ferrofluid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid

Or, better, a Magnetorheological fluid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetorheological_fluid

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