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Water Flows Uphill
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC are reporting James Dyson's new garden feature, a waterfall with water flowing uphill. Apparently, he wanted to recreate an Escher drawing."
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(-:Stephonovich:-)
"Who needs reincarnation when we've got parallel universes?" -Me
Waterfall.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
Since the 70's, there has been a cave on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyworld in which water appears to flow uphill.
The Imagineers did it cleverly with a slanted room and no point of reference. Not as geeky, but a really cool effect nonetheless which amazed me back in the day.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
are at the World of Escher. The man was a genius.
I'm not Seth.
A video would be much better but there is the iPix version.
RTFAWC:
The WC is for 'With Care' - the BBC write-up mentions the marching soldiers in an aside. Dyson himself mentions no such work directly (as quoted).
The first thing i would do having this invention in front of me, is to put a small floatation device (leaf, paper boat, etc...) at the bottom of the hill, to watch it float uphill.
Sadly, I would be completely dissapointed.
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Actually, that was the Haunted Shack at Knott's Berry Farm, just down the road from Disneyland. It was torn down about a couple of years ago to make way for a thrill ride, which was also quickly torn down because it was unsafe. It is now a picnic area.
An identical copy of the Haunted Shack was built at the Calico Ghost Town where it was called the Mystery Shack, but it burned down in 2001 and is currently being rebuilt.
If only antimatter was repelled by gravity. Antimatter is just normal matter with reverse charge and spin, so it obeys all normal physical laws. So-called "negative matter" would be repelled by gravity, but we don't know if it even exists or can be made.
If you RTFA
Derek Phillips, the Dyson engineer who spent 12 months building the feature, told BBC News Online that his head was spinning when he was given his brief.
"James came up to me and said he wanted this idea to make water go uphill. My initial reaction was to look for Paul Daniels' phone number. But I've had to become a bit of an illusionist myself."
so i think the credit goes to Mr Phillips for actually pulling it off, Dyson loves taking credit for other peoples work
The troubles here are two:
1) We have no experimental evidence as to how antimatter reacts to gravity (beond a couple of small ones where the externally-caused experimental error bars render the results statistically meaningless)
2) We don't know how gravity works. In GR, yes, antimatter has normal mass and reacts normally to gravity. But GR is not the last and final word on how gravity works, and several models otherwise fully consistent with known experimental data allow for anitmatter to be affected to a greater or lesser extent than normal matter by gravity, even to the point of sign reversal.
Since we have no experimental evidence and several potentially correct theories that give different answers, the only conclusion is that we don't know. The general opinion is that animatter is affected by gravity as normal matter, but we don't know that it is.
It's just north of Ayr, near a place called Dunure. Quite a bizarre thing, too. Website here
We don't have experimental proof yet, but we have overwhelming reason to believe antimatter fall down just like matter. You can work it out based on hysical constants and conservation of energy in a matter/antimatter annihilation. It is explained in this physics FAQ.
If antimatter is repelled by gravity then you either have a violation of conservation of energy, or physics constants are not constant.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Liquid helium at close to absolute zero. It doesn't flow uphill, it displays enormous capillary effect which can pull it right out of a container.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
... And besides if he's keeping it a secret, by definition he _can't_ have filed a patent. Patents were originally created to encourage people to make the design of their inventions public. You can hold exclusive rights over your invention forever if you keep the design a secret. But if the secret leaks out, you're screwed. On the other hand, if you make the design public through the patent process, the government will enforce your exclusive rights for you for a set period of time.
You are referring to the Reversing Falls in Saint John, NB.
Also, you are referring to The Magnetic Hill in Moncton, NB.
I've seen both. The Magnetic Hill is a cool illusion. The Reversing Falls isn't worth the drive. It looks cooler in pictures. It's really a reversing river more than anything.
There can be no doubt, for solid physical reasons, that antiparticles behave identically to regular particles when it comes to gravity.
First of all, the only relevant physical quantity to determine how something is affected by gravity is its mass (and equivalently, in relativity, energy). That's practically the definition of gravity -- the force one body exerts on another by virtue of its mass. In physicist speak, the gravitational field "couples" to mass/energy. Any force having an origin in some other physical quantity is by definition not gravity.
Now we have plenty of experimental evidence -- eg from particle accelerators that antimatter has positive mass, just like regular matter. Indeed, antiparticles have IDENTICAL masses to their corresponding real particles. Therefore they must be affected in the same way as regular matter by gravity.
Secondly, in both relativistic and quantum frameworks, gravity can only be understood if it is always attractive. In other words, mass can only be positive. In quantum terms, this comes out of the fact that gravity must be "spin 2" field. (There's a nice book by Feynman on his attempts to come up with a quantum theory of gravity that explains why it has to be spin 2).
Thirdly, according to quantum field theory the vacuum is filled with "virtual" particles and antiparticles -- that's the zero-point energy of the vacuum. Now the whole point about the vacuum is that it's the lowest possible energy state. If anti particles had negative mass-energy, they'd be in a lower energy state than the vacuum, which means that they'd be stable compared to the vacuum and would not decay back into the vacuum.
If that were true, the universe would long ago have filled up with antiparticles...
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Sorry, the Duh! is on you.
The gramattical guide book to which the parent refers is from the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy (think about it. How often do you find a grammer guide for time travel in your local bookshop?)
--- quote ---
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that
of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no
problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a
broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is
also no problem about changing the course of history - the course
of history does not change because it all fits together like a
jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things
they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the
end.
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main
work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time
Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you
for instance how to describe something that was about to happen
to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward
two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described
differently according to whether you are talking about it from
the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the
further future, or a time in the further past and is further
complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst
you are actually travelling from one time to another with the
intention of becoming your own father or mother.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified
Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up:
and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond
this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this
tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the
term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered
not to be.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Those who have visited Ayrshire in Scotland will most likely have visited Electric Brae, which is just about the wierdest place I've ever been. Things roll uphill here, or at least appear to.
Here's a link, and here's another.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
"a mile wide, an inch deep and runs uphill," as Lewis and Clark described it.
It's the Powder River, runs into the Yellowstone to the Missouri. There are places it appears to run uphill because the wind blows the surface backward. It's generally pretty shallow, hence 'the inch deep' and, well, the name.
There is no link I can point to on the web. Not even Google knows about it. Montana is very unwired.
See the following page for a list of more of the similar type of illusion:
o ll -uphill.html
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/r
A lot of people have a lot to say about the causeway, they've have been fighting about it for 30 years.
I think the "rich landowners" thing is pretty funny, Moncton isn't known for its wealth. The houses along that artifical lake are pretty middle class, we're not talking about millionaires. Also, while those guys oppose *removing* the causeway, they didn't have anything to do with *building* it in the first place.
Also, as the linked article points out, the fishermen downstream oppose removing the causeway.
Lastly, the "let's get rid of the causeway" people conveniently forget about the old garbage dump on the banks of the river just downstream from the causeway. (A lot of really smart environmental decisions were made in Moncton in the 60's, can you tell?) If they remove the causeway there will be a lot more erosion along that stretch of the river, unearthing God knows what. So any plan to remove the causeway had better budget for shoring up the banks of the old dump.
Just to be balanced, the people who want the causeway to be removed have a website here.