Could water be compressed so you could get a sea into a matchbox?

Answer 1

Normally, water is incompressible.
With enough force however, yes you could.
A black hole would do it in theory, although you'd struggle to control the water and get it into a matchbox.
Atoms are actually really spaced out - if you could shrink down to the size of an atom and look around, you'd see almost nothing, the other atoms would be miles away.
Forces produced by black holes crush the atoms together, eventually even breaking them apart into their individual components. This would make the material billions of times smaller.

Answer 2

Water CAN be compressed, just not very much relative to another fluid such as a gas. It has to do with the average kinetic energy of the molecules when in thermal equilibrium with the environment. The higher the average kinetic energy of each molecule, the more it vibrates. The more vibration, the further apart the molecules, The space between molecules determine the state, solid, liquid or gas. It also has to do with transferring electrons, and like charges repelling each other. A gas is very easily compress since the molecules are widely spaced and easily pushed closer together then they would be if left to themselves. A liquid is more closely ordered and has much less space between molecules, but still, there is rom to compress, it just takes much more force than air to squeeze out space between molecules. Even a solid will compress a fraction before it fractures under pressure. Funny thing about water, when you heat it, it boils, but if inside a rigid container, the pressure rises, as in a boiler, but it will stop boiling until you add more heat to start it boiling again. If you keep adding heat and letting the pressure rise, at a certain pressure and temperature which escapes me at the moment, the "critical point" the liquid/gas interface is undefined. Below that critical point, there is a clear separation of liquid and vapor.

Answer 3

Under normal circumstances, water does not change volume when placed under pressure.

Extreme gravity would overcome the intermolecular forces and cause the water to compress to a much denser value.

On the surface of a neutron star, the gravity is so strong that the electric force is overcome and the atoms shrink down to the size of their nucleus. At this size, there shouldn't be any problem fitting the sea into a matchbox.

The ultimate compression would be In a black hole, where all the world's oceans would be compressed to a single point with infinite density and no length, breadth or height. But you wouldn't be able to see it or do anything with it.

Answer 4

On earth water is virtually incompressible, even in the greatest depths of the oceans a cubic meter of water will only be compressed buy 0.001 of a millimeter. The only way the compression you are proposing could take place, would be inside a quantum singularity, a black hole. You would however be unable to observe this, and certainly not survive if you were in there with it, in any case you would have been crushed to the size of a microscopic speck. So to all practical intents and purposes no. If however such were possible on earth the weight would still remain the same, and would be impossible to lift, in fact it would exert so much pressure on the earth surface, that it would force its way through the crust, through the mantel, and down through the core right to the very center, though the intense heat of the earths interior would probably cause the most massive steam explosion ever, before it got halfway there.

Answer 5

An interesting question. The densest form of ordinary matter is neutrons, which have a density of 1900 million tonnes per cc. The total mass of all the world's oceans is just over 300 000 million million tonnes, and my trusty calculator tells me that if you compressed the world's oceans to this density, they'd occupy a volume of 1.73 cubic metres, which is bigger than a matchbox. But, if the entire Earth was squashed into a black hole, it would be a sphere about a centimetre in diameter. The Earth is much bigger than the oceans, so the answer to your question is yes. If a black hole gobbled up the oceans of the world, its volume would increase by less than the volume of a matchbox.

Answer 6

Anything could theoretically be compressed like that.

You'd need a pretty strong matchbox to hold it though, plus the matchbox would have a gravitational pull. I wouldn't want to stand right next to it.

Answer 7

NO ! .. Water is virtually incompressible.. So..you could only get about 20 cc in a matchbox (depends on the size). Maybe you mean cc not sea !!!

Answer 8

Sure. There is supposed to be Hydrogen as dense as metal on Jupiter.

How big is the matchbox - a novelty one, or one of the long BBQ type boxes?

Answer 9

No. And the black hole idea is lame. Inside a black hole is theorized to be very dense, enveloping light itself, but getting water near the black hole would destroy it. What you would have is not water as it is entering the black hole. The threshold is where the problem lies. Matter as it exists here is not the same under that much pressure inside; just as matter here is not the same as if it was on the Sun. It would be essentially changed *as it approached*, and there is the issue with entering a black hole.

Answer 10

If you could get the sea to the surface of a neutron star you could put it in a match box.