Floating Under a Levitating Liquid | Hacker News Reader

Floating Under a Levitating Liquid

nature.com

67 pointsbookofjoe20 comments

There's a video of those little boats on YT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bodsuTucSxQ

Pretty nice. I'd love to make a spinning variant.

Amazing video, thanks for sharing.

Now imagine a round/spherical version of that liquid band, but instead of getting the vibration from outside (the glass walls), the vibration is coming from inside, and you pretty much have a model for Earth and an alternative model for gravity.

Does this alternate model do anything useful, or have you just done a Fourier transform on a graph of the inverse square law?

Great question. What does the Fourier transform on a graph of the inverse square law look like? Would love a link if you have one.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=fft%281%2Fx%5E2%29

Thank you, that was fast! Looks linear when != 0, I would have expected it to be an oscillating function, if it's meant to model the effect of the vibration on the liquid.

Really good video, thank you for sharing. This is definitely the kind of thing you want to see in motion, not just read about :)

I'm confused by the reverse buoyancy. Is it from surface tension, air pressure, or something deeper?

I can only imagine the giggles in the lab when they got the little sailboat-shaped one to float. What a spectacular "go get the folks in the lab next door, they gotta see this" moment.

Imagine a planet with a liquid ocean-skin lifted up by constant earthquakes underneath, and two species each on their side of the ocean.

A novel iteration of parallel worlds.

Reminds me of Gregory Benford's short story "A Dance to Strange Musics", which features a levitating ocean held up by immense electrostatic forces.

What if we could model gravity on Earth as if it was produced by the planet's core pulsating in such a way that we get the same effect of the experiment, but across the whole planet surface?

One day I hope we can get this tech large scale enough to recreate the bath scene from space madness. Maybe we could even use waves to remotely oscillate the water so you don't need a large enclosed chamber (Although that probably wouldn't be very good for your body)

Ohh, my beloved ice cream bar, how I love to leeck your creamy center!

As someone who's lost far too much of their life to figures for scientific papers, I'd just like to say that the figures in this paper are absolutely fantastic. Save this one in your "good examples" folder!

In the next few decades, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing all kinds of crazy applications of vibration. There might be a physics and engineering revolution coming.

How's the environment inside the liquid? I'm curious, for example, if you could have a fish living in levitating water?

I'm judging from the video another comment above posted. But it seems to me, that if the vessel is at or close to atmospheric pressure that from most measures it should be unchanged.

The gas below the 'floating' liquid is at an increased pressure due to the weight of the liquid, and the gas above my be at a somewhat reduced pressure. But since the floating liquid has reached a stable point the pressure in the liquid should be much the same as it would be in normal conditions relative to the local atmospheric pressure. I can't imagine how shaking would affect that signficantly.

Regarding the shaking, anything in the liquid should receive a significantly dampened shaking and would likely acclimate.

This is at best armchair theorization on my part of course.

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