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Our broad objective today is to make sense and explore the implications of a remark about small scales by the physicist Erwin Schrodinger in a classic book called What Is Life? published in 1944.   Schrodinger asserted that underlying all order is random motion.  Is that so, and, if so, how does order emerge?
The activity falls into three parts. The first we will do and discuss together. From it will emerge an hypothesis about water that groups will attempt to test with relevant observations on Brownian Motion (movie). A summary of your observations and the conclusions you draw from them should be the first part of your lab report. Your group will then be asked to make an additional set of observations, and try and come up with an hypothesis to account for it that draws from the first two activities in the lab. The second part of your lab report should include a summary of your observations, the resulting hypothesis, and a suggestion of a set of new observations that could be used to test it.
(For more on randomness and order, see Evolution/Science: Inverting the Relationship Between Randomness and Meaning).