It’s the little things
It’s the little things
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/42205785
It’s the little things
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/42205785
good news: it wouldn't be
Sounds like a lot less cleaning in the house as it would just evaporate in less than a minute?
You could also clean it by putting a cloth in the lowest point it would run to so this sounds like a win to me
i think without surface tension it would also just fall out of the cloth as soon as you lift it, because nothing would wick against gravity. in fact of your floor is pourous at all, i reckon the water would just immediately all flow further down and you’d be left with a dry floor.
Oil doesn’t have surface tension and it stays in the cloth. At a certain point it’s not surface tension that keeps liquids together but friction.
Says my uneducated ass.
Without surface tension it would stick to whatever thing attracts it more. And a normal piece of cloth attracts water way more than a normal non-carpet floor.
But it also wouldn't flow freely as the GP expects either. Some oils have almost no surface tension, and they are famously a nightmare to clean up.
As a positive, the water would evaporate faster.
Wouldn’t it just be a superfluid at that point? Those things are ungovernable. We’d have way more problems that just spilled puddles. They crawl out of the beakers on their own. It’d be an absolute nightmare.
My bad superfluids are 0 viscosity not surface tension carry on we’re safe.
It cleans not only your floor, but also the ceilings and floors of the neighbors which are living below.
cool
I heard about superfluid crawling out of a container. But I wonder in this case, what works the fluid against the gravity upward the wall of the container?
It even pass through cristal bottles, you can't store it there. But it only exist under 2,5º K
Capillary action; which is a combination of adhesion, cohesion, and surface tension and for superfluids the additional ack of friction.
Unfortunately, if cohesion is removed from water, this might drastically change if the water can crawl up the container (the details would be based on the specific physics of this imaginary universe).
We would probably just not exist as liquids that want to hold together are pretty essential. Even if you just imagine blood not leaving your body through the tiniest nick.
I mean maybe? Surface tension play a role in blood staying on the wound, but it’s the blood itself that clots. I think the bigger issue would be your eyes, but maybe evolution creates a light sensor that wasn’t developed underwater…
I’m at a loss. In my heart of hearts I know we all die if water doesn’t tend to hold together, but I can’t think of WHY. Call xkcd.
But that 2 micron puddle would also evaporate in 2 microseconds!
"Everything is coated with a fine layer of shit." https://yourwildlife.org/2014/07/the-tip-of-the-gutberg-the-worlds-first-map-of-the-patina-of-feces/
Probably our bodies would instantly collapse into ooze like that guy in the first X-Men.
Technically even without surface tension, the microscopically small deviations in elevation in your floor, combined with evaporation and absorption would actually mean you would have a dry floor almost immediately.
Surface tension is just one aspect of the molecular bonds that cause water to accumulate, and if there were no surface tension that would mean those bonds would have to be nonexistent and thus water would not be able to condense into a liquid in the first place.
Ok, nerd....
you can have liquids with low surface tension that don't evaporate immediately (water + soap)
That's how water works in videogames
🤔
Water just doesn't work in minecraft
🤔
Assuming my home is perfectly level, which it is not
speak for yourself
Would capillary action still work, or does it depend on surface tension? I'm thinking about superfluids. Would the water stop at covering the floor?
You can try it yourself by adding a drop of dish soap to some water. Capillary action would still work and the water would evaporate long before covering the entire floor.
What if each H2O molecule was coated in a hydrophobic substance?
Spilling liquid helium to achieve this.
The boiling point of liquid helium is -268.93°C (4.2 Kelvin)
In this case human dwellings would be built to accomodate for this, since it's basically impossible to wipe up any water puddle. Builders would have to come up with some technology (drains in every room, floor heating as the norm to evaporate the 2µm water film etc.) or risk water damage. So you'd never have to wipe up a puddle since your apartment would have been built in a way that allows for the cleaning of water in other ways.