In Minecraft worlds, a source block of water can be reacted with another source block, two blocks away. This reaction creates a third "infinite" source block in the unoccupied intermediate block, so called because if the intermediate water source is destroyed or picked up by a player using a bucket, it will immediately regenerate itself.

A placement of water at several positions in an n X n board is said to be *stable* if no infinite water physics can in fact occur (under otherwise optimal conditions). This means that the total quantity of water in the system is held constant.

In short, no two source blocks can be graph-distance 2 from each other. - Gus Wiseman, Nov 27 2019