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???
03/22/10 08:13
Modified:
  03/22/10 08:16

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#174390 - Inertia.
Responding to: ???'s previous message
Jez Smith said:
Suppose we have a resvoir full of water and a dam at one end ten meters high, We attach to the bottom of the dam a rubber pipe lets say 3 million kilometers long,we take the plug out of the end of the pipe and the pipe fills with water and eventualy water flows out of the pipe.Next we take the open end of the pipe and we lift it to a height of 15 meters, information about the change in pressure which should stop the flow of water travels back down the pipe at the speed of sound in water, taking a few days. So the question is whats going on does water continue to flow out of the open end of the pipe while conditions say that the water flow should stop,how does water entering the pipe at the dam end know that the flow at the other end should have stopped ?
Does the water continue to flow thereby violating the conservation of energy, or does the water flow stop suggesting that the information traveled faster than the speed of sound in water down the pipe?


The water continues to flow for a while, since a moving column of a few million kilometers of water contains a lot of kinetic energy.

The water continuing to flow violates neither the conservation of energy nor the speed of light.

Or we have a tap on the end of the pipe, we close the tap water is virtualy incompresable, a shock wave travels back along the pipe at the speed of sound, water is still entering the pipe because it doesnt know that the tap is closed.


The water might be (virtually) incompressible, but there are two things that will happen instead of the speed of light being violated: Either the pipe will explode or (in case the pipe is made of an exotic, yet known material that can tolerate infinite stress) the water will turn into degenerate matter. Igniting a fusion reaction at the end of the pipe might be yet another (very spectacular) possibility. ;)

*sigh* Back to the drawing board. Making information travel faster than light isn't quite that easy, especially on a macroscopic scale. ;)


List of 8 messages in thread
TopicAuthorDate
Very off topic, but quite interesting            01/01/70 00:00      
   Division by zero is a no-no            01/01/70 00:00      
   Where will you stand?            01/01/70 00:00      
      it doesnt have to be that long            01/01/70 00:00      
   wikipedia has equations for water hammer            01/01/70 00:00      
   Must be some kind of ... ... Hot Tub Time Machine            01/01/70 00:00      
   In the energy balance...            01/01/70 00:00      
   Inertia.            01/01/70 00:00      

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