Purity

In a way, the concept of Purity should seem easy, yet when we try to put it into words, it becomes more difficult.

We know that water from the oceans, called Salt Water, is not pure. Something in it renders it nondrinkable, and we can figure out from the taste, and collecting the solid that remains after the water evaporates off, that this impurity is salt.

We can boil water and collect it by distillation to improve its purity. We might consider that what we have is still not perfectly pure because we can’t assure that the surfaces of the equipment used are perfectly clean. And if you don’t have pure water to use to wash those surfaces, how can you get them perfectly clean?

The idea of Purity is a sort of cousin to Concentration, for we might use concentration to quantify the impurities in the element we wish to purify.