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 Originally Posted by OngBonga
Why would an isolated water molecule behave like a gas? Isn't that equally as absurd as calling it a liquid? Like a liquid, a gas is a fluid. If we're being pedantic, surely an isolated molecule isn't in any state of matter we can relate to, it's in its own state... we might as well just call this state "molecular".
The problem is in the fact that a single molecule doesn't have any inter-molecular bonds to form with other identical molecules. It's those bonds that determine the phase of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma - noting that some materials have multiple, distinct solid phases). We can retreat to saying an isolated molecule acts like a gas because to first approximation, particles in a gas do not interact with each other (or do so infrequently compared to the time they spend not interacting).
In truth, gas particles do interact, but, as is often the case in physics, the approximation gives remarkably good results while still being relatively easy to calculate.
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