It would instead instantly make it extremely obvious how uneven my floor is.
It’d evaporate much quicker TBF. Although that also means that the BP would be much lower and tea and coffee wouldn’t be a thing and boiling wouldn’t be a reliable method of cooking. although on the flip side, you could increase the strength of alcoholic beverages by boiling the water off instead of distilling the alcohol.
Yep. Generally if one property of it was so different, I’d expect many others to be different as a result of that too. So physics and chemistry as we know them (with so many things relying on water) wouldn’t exist. And thinking further how life on Earth started off in the water…
We’re 60% water and not really water-tight as it is.
Would it still be possible to have a shower?
Yes. But you probably wouldn’t be alive.
Can we make liquids like that? Sounds useful in some situations.
Yes and no. No surface tension implies vanishing intermolecular forces, so the liquid would not be cohesive and would expand in all directions to the volume of the room… which is pretty much the definition of a gas. Not quite though: supercritical fluids also do this as long as temperature and pressure remain high enough, and are indeed useful in niche applications industrially.
Liquid with low to none surface tension? Relatively possivle, tensioactives and additives within soaps and washing up liquids can do that.
And lakes affected by this are biologically damaged or dead, as surface tension is essntial to life.
Edit: that line is something they would absolutely add to an ATHF episode, but the consequences would be absurd as usual.
You can not “make” a given liquid like that but there are some liquids with low surface tension. From the back of my head I remember the Avogadro experiment, but to lazy to look it up. What I recall is that he “counted” the amount of particles in a drop of oil because it forms a mini layer of lying on top of water. You might notice when you drop a bit of oil in water, that it always creates a giant puddle.
Back to the original post: that thin layer of water would just evaporated instantly
wouldn’t it also be impossible to drink? The water would just seep out of any cup and find the path of least resistance to the floor
At least with oil you can just raw dog the nozzle and squeeze it directly in, guzzling down those calories by the gallon at least until the attendant starts to run over, but by then you pull out your lighter threateningly and shake your head until he backs off again
Let’s see AI try to recreate this coherent incoherence! HUMANS REPRESENT!
wat
we’re talking extreme fluid dynamics are we not
So it would actually be more practical, don’t need to mop it up if it evaporates.
This is how science fiction is made! Special Meta materials are very under-explored, It seems reasonable that in a future high tech society they would be increasingly common.
Mostly we get “faster engines” and “advanced computermachines that sometimes perform unexplained magic”
if we lived in a high pressure environment, this totally would happen.
We would not have life! Water is a polar molecule that is very different from most other liquids. Its the specific surface tension properties that help to create life. The reason why we search for planets with water. We’ve never worked out a way for any life to exists without the amazing H2O.
Now imagine what wonders we could have if there were a few other quicky molecules.
Every molecule is quirky in its own way…
That’s what my mum says! But my dad says my half life is too long?
What if it just applied to chlorinated tap water then
As an odd thought experiment or are we hoping that the laws of physics might be different there? All water, except brand new in reaction space is almost certainly going to contain dissolved ions
Well I think the idea is more that for some reason water needs to be treated with something that removes surface tension if you want to safely pipe it to people’s houses. At least that shouldn’t destroy all life.
wouldn’t this evaporate extremely quick though?
Yeah, I’ll often spread spilled water across the table just so that it evaporates within a couple minutes.
Must be nice living somewhere dry. I’d just end up with a moldy table a day later.
You can add a wetting agent to water to decrease the surface tension
wetter water
I know a guy who drank some WaterWetter and got pretty sick. He was an idiot.
Add more water
For a liquid to be a liquid, rather than a gas, it needs to be held together by intermolecular forces. Which means it will have some amount of surface tension. I therefore dismiss this hypothetical as physically unrealistic! :P
supercritical helium does some really weird shit, I’d call this one plausible.
Supercritical fluids are more like a gas than a liquid. Their lack of surface tension means they’ll diffuse throughout whatever container you put them in, so they can’t really be “poured” like a liquid can. They’re actually a pretty good example of why liquids need surface tension to be liquid.
that’s a pretty good point, it’s literally trapped between being a liquid and a gas. If this was BattleBots, they’d let it compete once and then ban it.
“Trapped between liquid and gas” is kind of the opposite of what a supercritical fluid is. It’s more that gas and liquid states are “trapped” in a region of phase space, while supercritical fluids exist in the place where the demarcation between the two no longer exists (which is usually a far larger region than where it does).
I think they meant to say superfluid helium.
Superfluid. It can be supercritical, but superfluid is the special thing for helium.
You do some pretty weird shit.
Oh, snaaaaaap.
supercritical
does some really weird shit
I’m no geologist, but I could have guessed that without any further specifics 😉
Unless its a hydrocarbon product, which can (and does) spread over surfaces it can’t mix with/soak into in single molecules thick sheets.
Aha! But languical constructs allow and do allow hyperboles! So it could be argued that the colleague asked for the minimum allowed by our bindings law!
I request a motion to dismiss your dismissal :>
look…I’m just glad roaches don’t have sharp teeth and spiders can’t fly.
let’s stop while we’re ahead
When some spiders are born, sometimes hundreds at a time, they cast little parachute webs and ride the wind to wherever they might go.
Palmetto bugs are like mean flying roaches that bite.
You’ll never escape the horrors of the beauty in nature.
Let’s stop
while we’re ahead“Palmetto bugs” are just roaches, period. That name refers to either the Florida woods cockroach or the American cockroach.
we also wouldn’t have icicles :(
The water would react similarly to alcohol. Yes, the puddle would be bigger but it would evaporate faster.
at least it wouldn’t wet your socks. i think capillary action relies on surface tension
It relies on differences in surface tension. If a liquid has a lower surface tension (energy) towards one surface than another, you get the typical capillary effect. In the case of water, the water-air energy is lower than the water-<whatever your capillary is made of> energy, so you get a capillary effect.
If water had exactly zero surface tension against every interface,
- it would not exhibit any capillary action
- life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
- your socks would remain dry
life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
This was the first thought that came to my mind on seeing this post.
For starters, basicaly most (all?) land based plants are fucked, they can no longer internally hydrate, also water in soil behaves totally differently, so …yeah.
(oh on that note, snap your fingers and water has 0 surface tension? time for a lot of landslides/sinkholes in humid areas)
Then you’ve got beings with active circulatory systems, who… may to some extent be able to live, but lots of pulmonary / circulatory problems are gonna happen.
I guess maybe totally waterborne life could survive, maybe… but 0 surface tension of water probably changes how salinity works…
Yeah, this would be very bad, lol.
If we want to go to extremes, zero surface tension means no nucleation barrier for critical bubbles. In practice, this implies that liquid water is unstable, and will spontaneously vaporise at all conditions.
So yeah, all life ends pretty quickly.
Wow, that’s much worse lol!
life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
your socks would remain dry
Well if water didn’t have its unique properties of cohesion and adhesion we likely wouldn’t be here anyways.
