10001110100110101
Dang. The day started off great, but now it's raining. How the heck am I going to get my blades back home?!?
Seems like MJO has finally responded, so I can post the answer now. It's a long one, and aimed for a more general audiance, but it's somewhat interesting. If it doesn't interest you, then go to the end where the relevant information is.
This teaser is nearly a hundred of years old. It appeared soon after Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon, his famous story of the three men who were shot from a cannon. In it he tells how the men became weightless and floated around inside their cabin for a while. The scene was so interesting that other science fiction writers copied it. They added to it by having characters eat weightless food and use supplies of weightless bottled water. In trying to describe a meal in space, they ran into the problem of the half-full bottle.
The writers considered several facts. On Earth water is heavier than air, so water rests on the bottom of a bottle and air goes up to the top. But when water and air become weightless, neither can sink below the other. Both weight the same - zero - although no change in form takes place. Water continues to be a liquid and air continues to be a gas. Their molecules - the invisible particles of which they are made - stay the same.
Therefore, the writers reasoned, the way the air and water act in the bottle depends on the way their molecules move.
Air molecules have no attraction for each other. Nor have they any attraction for water or glass. They spread out, taking up as much space as they can find.
Water molecules tend to stick together, forming a liquid that can be poured. Their stickiness makes water molecules gather into drops. Water molecules are also drawn toward glass.
Which of these attractions is strongest? Some science fiction writers guessed that water molecules have more attraction for each other than for glass, and in their stories water formed a big blob in the center of the bottle. Other writers had the water stick to the glass, leaving the space in the middle of the bottle for the air.
When physicists were asked which was right, they said they did not know. They too began discussing the problem, for they realized it would come up in equipping real spaceships.
Finally Russian and American astronauts solved the problem. Colonel Popovitch, a Russian astronaut who spent three days in a satellite in 1962, reported, "I took a bottle half full of water with me. In the wightless state the water gathered around the edge of the bottle and the air collected in the middle in a little sphere. It stayed there even when I shook the bottle."
So there's your answer. The attraction between the water and the glass (adhesion) is stronger than the attraction between the water with itself (cohesion). You can check it out for yourself by putting some water into a glass. Check out the surface of the water, near the glass, you should see that the water curves up (a concave meniscus), which indicates that the glass is "pulling" the water up (and also leads to capillary action).
So it seems as if Growly is right this time around. I'll give girl some marks for creative writing which comes in handy when you don't know the answer and want to distract the marker from that fact.
These two examples were the better problems in the book, there are a couple of other ones in there I'll probably mention (a lot of the questions posed in there are kinda dumb), but I'm going to go around to see if there are any other interesting scientific (or mathematic) problems.
The counter is sort of working ATM. There's something about this version of Apache that doesn't seem to like spitting out some numbers, but I guess I'll have to live with it for now. I can see the sunshine in the distance, so I might be able to blade home, but it seems as Dusty might be lending me his bar fridge so I'll see if I can get a ride..
Thursday, May 11, 2000 at 21:32:06 (UTC)
Cursessss...! *shakes fist*
who'd believe a guy named "Colonel Popovitch" anyway??
Hwanalytic (stripped of Dr.)
Thursday, May 11, 2000 at 21:36:37 (UTC)
I WON! I WON! *Ralph Wiggum voice*
I disagree with the Russian dude, though. I don't think the air would've formed "a little sphere" in the center. Rather, the air should conform to the volume left over by the water inside the bottle once the H20 has settled down.
But wait...he saw it with his own eyes, you say. What if the air region had REALLY been a sphere? Then probably our explanation is wrong...
Reg Popovich<e-mail>