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'Floating Bridge' Property of Water Found
eldavojohn writes "When exposed to high voltage, water does some interesting things. From the article, 'water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity. Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.'"
Now we can build 25mm bridges to nowhere!! fp?
When people electrocute me I also jump out of my beaker.
Like a bridge *entirely *composed *of troubled water...?
I'm thinking Bridge *of* the River Kwai, maybe...
Burn it! Burn it!
"Fascinating!"
and it makes me wonder.. where they talk about the changes in water density.
IF you could find a way to change the density of water within living cells-- decrease slowly, and increase rapidly...
by oh say, 10% or more from standard...
When you decrease slowly, then cellular walls could expand to accomodate the increased volume without bursting...
now your return the density to normal (if necassary).. and before the cells recover- you freeze the cells-- and the expansion of the frozen water does not cause massive gross cellular damage.
now cyronics is much more achievable.. (of course, the voltages described do not seem condusive to application to living flesh,, but perhaps another method could be found for the same effect...)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
So raise your hand if you think that was a Russian water-tentacle.
At this point, does anyone doubt that dolphins are the world's true leaders, biding their time until our large network of water bridges and tubes combined with rising ocean levels due to global warming allows them to take back what was once theirs?
It's become a struggle for control. The Republicans are the dolphin elite, cleverly disguised. Take George W.: Jovial, friendly on the outside, but turn your back or threaten him and you're getting a mouthful of tiny little teeth IN YOUR NECK. Meanwhile, Hillary, leader of the lizard people and true bloodline-confirmed heiress to the Reptilian crown attempts to prevent the dolphin's plans from reaching fruition and claiming the planet as her own.
Since that is liquid at superconducting temperatures, and does similar things?
Actually the problem with freezing isn't the expansion, the cells could stretch enough to allow that. The problem is the ice crystals that tend to slice up the cells like a million tiny rasor blades. A further problem is cracking of the ice while it's going from freezing down to liquid nitrogen temperature.
A bridge of water? How curious. I wonder if I can walk on it... KRZZRRT!
I predict we'll be seeing homeopathic "medicine" made out of this magick water within a few weeks.
We know your tricks, Jesus. You were generating large amounts of voltage through each of your legs. It's only a matter of time before we figure the other ones out!
I have a feeling the video would be much more interesting...
What does empty space mean here?
Was the experiment done in a vacuum, open air, or in space?
Given enough self-support, I can take large chunks of electrically cooled water and make bridges across two solid objects (ie riverbanks) as high as I think practical to create a passable bridge between two land masses. How long said bridge structure would last depends on environmental conditions, but I can make a substance known as Pycrete, invented during the second world war, by adding woodchip to the water as it cools, increasing its heat capacity a thousandfold and its resistance to hydrodynamic shock a millionfold.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
This has to do with the diamagnetic principles of water. What you're essentially doing is creating a magnetic field differential and just like trying to keep two magnets apart at short distances, they attract. Conversely, when you pull them apart at 25 mm (1 inch) they separate and "lose that lovin' feeling".
We can finally build that bridge to Hawaii.
Well, that explains the toaster my mom gave me for a tub toy when I was a kid.
She was trying to expand my education!
Now, thus, it turns out Jesus was just a hippy under high voltage! That would explain not only his water-walking, but also the aureole he's always depicted with.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
...so you don't have to cope with skeptical people.
- What you said that is?
- A water bridge.
- That's bullshit.
- It's true. The water is floating between the beakers.
- Oh, really? Then I guess it's okay for me to touch to confirm it, right?
- I don't recommend that.
- I knew it. You're so full of shit.
- Okay, touch it if you want. But I wouldn't do that.
- *laughs* Yeah, I'll just touch this "water bridge" and we can't move on with our... AAHHH!!!
- *increases voltage gradually* That's for calling me a liar. Asshole.
The floating water bridge
Elmar C Fuchs, Jakob Woisetschlager, Karl Gatterer, Eugen Maier, Rene Pecnik, Gert Holler and Helmut Eisenkolbl
Human cells have membranes, not walls. Only plants and bacteria have walls.
Ah, damn... I'm going to have to shoot my TV again.
And to make things worse :-) it can be formed in a large number of types of ice, not only one type. Which type depends on the pressure involved. (I don't have the exact figure about how many types of ice that exists, but I think it's at least eight.) Some types of ice has a higher density than the liquid form of water while other as we are familiar with has a lower which results in the fact that ice floats. If ice hadn't been able to float life as we know it wouldn't have formed, or at least the oceans would be a lot different since the bottom would be covered in ice.
Depending on the temperature and pressure water can change state from solid to gas or vice versa without going to the liquid phase. There is also at least one point at which the properties that separates the gas form and the liquid form ceases to have a meaning and a fourth state is entered. If I remember it correctly it appears at a temperature of about 340 degrees C. (I may be wrong)
And even if we don't think about it as such water is actually one of the best solvents around. More often we think about some petrol or alcohol when we are saying solvent, but water is also our friend here. The reason why water and oil doesn't mix is because water is a polar molecule with a positive and a negative side while the molecules oil is built on are electrically neutral. An intermediate here are alcohols (a few of them drinkable, but most of them not - or only once) where one end of the molecule is electrically neutral and friend with oil while the other is polarized and water-friendly. This means that alcohols can be used when you want to mix water and oil. In some cases it is possible to create an emulsion of water and oil too, and one of the most common is mayonnaise (which most people has been in contact with).
Sometimes the term heavy water is making it's way through the news. It is actually ordinary water - chemically speaking - which means that there is no problem if you should drink it - except that it's rather expensive. The difference is that one or both of the hydrogen atoms in the molecule has an extra neutron or two. These forms are called deuterium or tritium. The extra neutron involved means that the atoms can be fused with each other to create helium. It is possible to fuse plain hydrogen atoms too, but the amount of energy needed is much larger and not precisely what can be done in a normal lab.
At least two cases has been in movies or TV series that I know of that refers to heavy water and special properties (neither of them plausible) and the first was a humor series involving English POW:s in a German camp where they were trying to seed the idea of the wonder properties of heavy water when it comes to hair growth to a bald German. The second was that it could be used to cure cancer. (don't believe either)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Or you could increase the density of water for super-human powers, like instant brass knuckles. Although, if you wanted to preserve volume, you'd have to drink a lot of water beforehand and then expel it afterwords. You could achieve both of these by drinking some fluid that contained both water and a time-release diuretic. Also adds a nice subplot of a man caught in a self destructive cycle of addiction. They called him PubMan.
Wow, OK now.
Have we discovered the origin of Life yet?
I just reproduced this using di water and a 5kV AC powersupply. I couldn't get a bridge as long as theirs and I had to start mine by putting the beakers close enough to arcover then dropping a starter drop of water on the arc, then the arc vanished and water spanned the gap as I increased the distance between beakers.
{couldn't resist...}
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Even if I say so myself. ;-)
But...yeah, I know it's not going to happen: too many bible-belt USA-dudes on slashdot for that. But at least they could place it under 'flamebait', then.
Make a joke about anything you want - but not about the Bible, God and Jesus! Meh.
Let me be *really* off topic now: ever noticed that, if the bible-belt twits got their way, they would be giving out fatwas of their own? There isn't really THAT much difference between fundamentalist moslims and fundamentalist christians.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I have a vague memory that in one episode of MacGyver, the hero did something like this to redirect water from the corrupt landowner's property to nearby drought-stricken peasant's fields. He used a car battery initially to get the voltage required to create the water bridge. But when the car battery started to die, he used the water to drive a small generator (made from an empty Wite-Out bottle, some fuse wire and scuba diver flippers) that produced the electricity to keep the water bridge going. It was a great episode, even if the perpetual-motion machine was a bit far fetched.
Timbers? Girders? I don't think there's a load-bearing wall to be found here...
What's holding up yours?
Good one. Very Insightfull.
... get ready star trek fans... PLAZMA...
The point at which water and steam are the same is a line, actulally of pressure, that goes down to its 'Triple' point. Where without a change in potential, H2O can exist in all three phases. If you increase its pressure/temprature way up, like you say to 340^o C, then all the electrons cannot attach themselves to the molicules, and the electrical properties are lost, and the gas enters the fouth state of matter called
Seems that some gases when exposed to electrical current, at room tempretures, when they strip their electrons off, give off diffrent wavelengths of light... so if you can arrainge them in a matrix, you have a Plazma TV/Display.
Uhh.. There is a problem with Heavy water. Really bad to drink... Particularly hard-hit by heavy water are the delicate assemblies of mitotic spindle formation necessary for cell division in eukaryotes. Regular tap water gives off neutrons too, but not in any sufficent quantity to be dangerous. Almost undetectible from the backround radiation. A molocule of heavy water is about 1 in 41 Million. so to get a gallon of heavy water, you need to process at least 4 times that amount.
Think 10 days of clean mississippi flow.
(And you did guess right about the number of types of ice. Of course there is a S.F. Book called Ice-9, but its fictional)
If you take water, as steam, and swril it around a cylinder, the heaver molocules will move to the sides, where you can siphon them off. Turns out that 90cm are about right for this. SO when a county like Iraq starts ordering up a storm of 90cm alumium tubes...
BUT, inorder to get enough water to seperate out the heavy molocules, you need an enoumus water source. In Germany, they used alpine rivers as the water source. In Iraq, you would need an extrodinarly large amount of fresh water to putify out the heavy water, and by the time the Tigrus and Euprhaties rivers reach Bagdad... the water is sufficently polluted to make it unusable for heavy water production. Now, if you had a place with heavy rainfall, little air pollution, like North Korea, you can make lots of heavy water, and of course sell it to the Iraqis.
It realy doesnt take much to figure this stuff out.
Subject: The Ant and the Grasshopper
*OLD VERSION*:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE OLD STORY: Work and be responsible!
-=-=-
*MODERN (JADED) VERSION:*
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. All he wants to do is be left alone. But times were hard. It seems that between federal taxes, state taxes, sales taxes, Social Security taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, ad nausem...that the ant had too little left over to properly prepare for the future. Like most ants, he was forced to take a second job, but even with that, during a crisis, he was often forced to borrow money at high interests rates just to make it through a tough period. And getting caught back up again after he got back on his feet was almost impossible.
Ironic, because he paid such a high portion of his income out in taxes -- that were supposed to pay for the "services" he used -- the ant was hit with an extra fee for almost every service he attempted to use. There were fees to drive his car on the road. Fees to see the people whose salary was paid for by him. There were even fees to build on his own property. It seemed that every where the poor ant turned, there was someone with their hand out trying to get another piece of his income.
And, because of ever-soaring health-insurance premiums, the ant's employer was forced to drop to a cheaper insurer, which also meant his coverage was downgraded. Even with having insurance, the ant lived in fear of getting sick. And he was lucky, because many of his friends had lost their insurance all together.
The grasshoppers, however, thinks ants are fools and they all party hard all the way through college. Some grasshoppers become doctors, some lawyers, some politicians, and some go into the energy field. Other grasshoppers rise up the ranks of the military and law enforcement, while others drift upwards in labor unions.
The grasshoppers have figured out a way to live off of the labor of the ants. It is easy money and the grasshoppers party like there is no tomorrow.
The doctor grasshoppers found that they could charge huge amounts of money if the ants got sick. They found any numbers of things they could charge inflated prices for. Many broke the law and charged for things they didn't even do, while many stayed within the bounds of the law legally, while crossing the line morally. While the ants worried about making repairs to their little houses, the doctor grasshoppers had so much money that they pondered how park it in off shore bank accounts in order to avoid paying taxes. The grasshoppers knew that if they ran into real trouble, they could get their lawyer grasshopper buddies to get them off the hook.
The politician grasshoppers worked the ants for all they could, all the time proclaiming to be helping the ants. They tried their best to tighten the screws on the ants, but because some were slipping through the cracks, they installed great monitoring systems to watch the ants. It drove the grasshoppers mad to know there were ants out there that they didn't know what they were doing. They monitored their banking transactions. They recorded their telephone calls. They recorded every ant track left on the Internet. They even installed cameras in every place they could think of. Ironically, they did all of this by using money from the ants, and because that wasn't enough money to pay for it all, they borrowed money that the ant's children would be forced to pay back some day.
To make matters worse, the grasshopper king had conspired with the grasshoppers in the energy field to take over a major oil producing country. It seems the ants in that country
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
American beer does the very same thing.. /thought it was funny //is american.. drank american beer last night
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Sorry, but yes, you can burn this bridge too!
-- thinkyhead software and media
I, for one, welcome our... wait, what?
hi, i don't think thats plasma at that point. at pressures or temperatures higher than that there is no phase change between solid and liquid, but thats not plasma. you can go to solid and liquid without a phase change (no latent heat) by going around that point.
"Shhh, be vewy vewy quiet; I'm hunting high frequency oscillations."
yup. And I bet that's also how Moses parted the Red Sea. Using some sort of high voltage electricity make water do what he wanted :-)
-f.
...and remember in your brain boggle, wrong starts with a wubble-u.
So how is this magic? Wouldn't any covalent bonded molecule exhibit these properties? We're just interested in water on the anthropic principle - if it wasn't so "interesting" we'd all be dead. It doesn't mean its a magical chemical.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Why, an endless stack of turtles, of course...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Good thing there aren't nine types of ice.
If one considers that burning is a chemical change on the molecular level then what we are seeing might actually be burning.
A high voltage condition puts a lot of excess energy in the water now consider that the water molecules are being forced to break their bonds and decomposing into their component parts being hydrogen and oxygen, since they are not in contact with say Carbon in any great quantity they don't burn in what we would understand as fire. The electricity would pull off one of the atoms either a oxygen or a hydrogen atom leaving a unbalanced pair with enough of a charge to attract a stray atom of which there are suddenly a lot. So the upshot it they can only reform back into H2O and since the current is going in one direction the momentum of the breaking forms the bridge. The other way would be if forming weak molecules of H4C2 which can't hold together and break down again also along the lines of the current. Since the current is originating from one direction its natural that they are breaking along the direction of the current the motion is consistently between the two poles.
Ok, I am now officially out of crack, see you guy again once I have scored.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
It's not a perpetual motion machine, as far as I can tell, unless you necessarily need more electricity to make the water bridge as you'd gain from the water falling, but as long as it's going downhill, there's at least the possibility of a net power gain, right?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm thinking of a bartenderless bar, controlled by some OS.
And I'm talking about alcohol diluted enough that its not going to become a Flaming Moe.
you're correct,
That's known as the critical point, the temperature and pressure above which there is no distinct transition between liquid and gas.
How dare you refer to his noodly appendage as "a bridge"!
It's a sign! Bow down! Look busy!
Looks like Cyan had it all wrong when they made Riven... it isn't air that can form a bridge through water when exposed to magnetism, it's water that can form a bridge through air when exposed to high voltage.
-proidiot
I bet its already being sold.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have some questions. Maybe somebody with a 20KV power supply and rubber boots could find this out..
1. Would work with other polar solutions? Of course you want one that won't combust..
2. It seems this must be in operation at small scales, where static electricity easily makes huge charges? link
3. If you took 2 icicles and made a V out of them could you make a Jacob's Ladder high voltage traveling arc with them? (maybe the tips would shoot off into someone's eye so we should use ice blocks tilted away from each other) Would the arc melt the ice where it touches, melting just enough ice into water to maintain an arc? Maybe it could be started by wetting the blocks or painting a line of iron filings or silver paint on each side?
4. This sounds like it might have some parallels with the cellular structures formed by convection and magnetic fields in the sun?
5. What can be done with this at a household scale with just static no scary generators? It would seem a 0.5mm gap is within body voltage range, or 2-3mm with clothing static. (see above link). I was wondering if water could be made to climb up a stepped (or spirally lined) bowl, or wander across a stroked fresnel lens. Though I guess a web-like cloth thing would be more of a gap..
...then what, praytell, is holding up your roof?
I live in an inflatable dome -- it's all membrane, supported by air.
This reminds me of a story about Queen Victoria (of Britain.) Someone was showing her around a factory where they were producing wire for electrical street lighting, and she asked:
"How do you drill the hole in the wire for the electricity to go through?"
While this revealed that she didn't understand how electricity works, it was rather a good question.
How does this relate to the matter at hand? Well, we need to come up with some good questions to help us work out how this water bridge thing works.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Don't try this in the shower.
...be careful what you electrocute
Table-ized A.I.
...turn it into a weapon?
Besides the previously mentioned cell expansion...
I'm disappointed to not see a comment about beaker sex.
What the hell are you trying to do, promote that killer chemical Dihydrogen Monoxide?!
Can't believe no one else posted this yet...
http://web.archive.org/web/19970125142623/media.circus.com/~no_dhmo/
While I'm not sure there wasn't actually a book called Ice 9, it was Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.) that contained a storyline revolving around Ice 9.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
...then what, praytell, is holding up your roof?
Timber shoring.
I find it scary that someone actually found that informative.
All new highway projects have to have accomodations for bicycles and pedestrians.
If this bridge does not have a sidewalk and a bicycle lane, then it has to be re-built.
Unfortunately, there are over a dozen types of ice, including Ice 9. Is it time to start panicking?
Everything else seems good, but...
...I'm pretty sure just about every element/compound does that. The only difference is what temperatures and pressures are needed.
"Depending on the temperature and pressure water can change state from solid to gas or vice versa without going to the liquid phase. There is also at least one point at which the properties that separates the gas form and the liquid form ceases to have a meaning and a fourth state is entered. If I remember it correctly it appears at a temperature of about 340 degrees C. (I may be wrong) "
That was an episode of "Hogan's Heroes", and the context was scientifically accurate: the Germans were trying to figure out how to use it in nuclear reactors.
Fortunately for us, Nazi party dogma demanded that "jew science" be ignored -- many scientists left the country, including a chap by the name of Albert Einstein, who wrote a letter to Roosevent...
Doubly fortunately for us, resistance fighters in Scandinavia (I belive it was Norway, and there was a documentary aired on PBS's "Nova" show on the story) managed to locate a large shipment of heavy water destined for Germany, and sank it.
These two events stalled Nazi research on the atomic bomb long enough that we built it first. (Even though the war in Europe was over by the time we got to use it.)
In the 60s, when the Hogan's Heroes episode was aired, the bit about Einstein was widely known, as Einstein was a pop culture figure in the 50s. The bit about the Norwegians, not so much. The Hogan's Heroes episode was loosely based on the Norwegian story.
But back to your original point: heavy water was of great interest during WW2. For most of WW2, nobody was allowed to know why. Hence the wacky stories about its "magical" properties. In the episode you remember, neither Germany's Commandant Klink nor his US adversary Col. Hogan would have known anything about the heavy water other than that it was Very Very Very Important.
just don't open the door.
It couldn't be a veiled nod to a theist belief set? ;)
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Gives a whole new meaning to the term 'Water Torture'...
This is a teste.
The abundance of deuterium in seawater is about 1/6400.
What happens when you get three or more tubes close together? Does it make a solid or hollow shape? What about pulsing the current? Could we get a blob of water to float in place, slowly sink down with every pulse, or just fall to the ground?
Sometimes the term heavy water is making it's way through the news. It is actually ordinary water - chemically speaking - which means that there is no problem if you should drink it - except that it's rather expensive. The difference is that one or both of the hydrogen atoms in the molecule has an extra neutron or two.
Heavy water normally means water containing deuterium, not tritium. Deuterium is not radioactive, while tritium is. You shouldn't drink either of them.
Heavy water is toxic, even though it is chemically identical to regular water. Why? The kinetic isotope effect. Molecules of heavy water are about 6.25% heavier than regular water, so they don't move as fast. In biology, many important things happen when large proteins interact with each other in very specific ways. In the presence of heavy water, the speed changes sufficiently to mess up a lot of things.
Well, our roof is held up by lots and lots of the cell walls from dead plants (trees).
We do have neighbors whose roof is held up by piled up stones, in the form of that artificial conglomerate stone called "concrete". But most of the neighborhood's houses are made up primarily of dead-tree cell walls.
Cellulose and lignin can make for fairly strong walls, as long as you don't pile them up too far. Of course, sequoias do manage to make a sturdy pile of cell walls that are taller than the buildings that most of us live in, but I wouldn't recommend trying to make a building that tall out of sequoia skeletons.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
What's holding up yours?
Planning department red tape.
This page says the critical point is at 374 celsius.
I come here for the love
You can drive a pump from a water wheel as long as the water wheel is far enough below the pump. The experiment in the article is about the high voltage potential moving the water through the air without support
You apply a force to an object and it moves. Using a garden hose is more effective than voltage at the macro scale. If your dealing on the micro/nano scale, this has been known for at least 5 years (I've known this for 5 years, it's probably been around much much longer).