An AESOP's fable come to life!!!
The water will get sleepy and move back downhill. It happens all the time. Mark my word.
Preprint (no subscription needed) available at http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512246; movies and short explanation available at the author's website.
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Ahhh! Witch!
...Actually, that is pretty interesting. Could be interesting to see what other applications it could be used for.
I know a few Taoists who are going to be very unhappy about this. Sun Tzu may have to revise all those statements about water flowing downhill.
Gee, I thought you could get water to run anywhere by showing it a pic with Helen Thomas, wearing either a bathing suit, or a shower cap....
Australian researchers have experimentally shown that microscopic systems (a nano-machine) may spontaneously become more orderly for short periods of time--a development that would be tantamount to violating the second law of thermodynamics, if it happened in a larger system. Don't worry, nature still rigorously enforces the venerable second law in macroscopic systems, but engineers will want to keep limits to the second law in mind when designing nanoscale machines. The new experiment also potentially has important ramifications for an understanding of the mechanics of life on the scale of microbes and cells.There's another article from a couple years ago that I can't find right now, where scientists were able to structure the physical environment surrounding a molecule or some kind of nanoparticle such that the random Brownian motion was channeled into a specific direction, like a ratchet. The idea there was, again, that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics doesn't apply as forcefully to a very small object as it does to something on a macro-scale, and so nanoengineers can have a very different set of constraints to work with than engineers who build things on "our" scale.There are numerous ways to summarize the second law of thermodynamics. One of the simplest is to note that it's impossible simply to extract the heat energy from some reservoir and use it to do work. Otherwise, machines could run on the energy in a glass of water, for example, by extracting heat and leaving behind a lump of ice. If this were possible, refrigerators and freezers could create electrical power rather that consuming it. The second law typically concerns collections of many trillions of particles--such as the molecules in an iron rod, or a cup of tea, or a helium balloon--and it works well because it is essentially a statistical statement about the collective behavior of countless particles we could never hope to track individually. In systems of only a few particles, the statistics are grainier, and circumstances may arise that would be highly improbable in large systems. Therefore, the second law of thermodynamics is not generally applied to small collections of particles.
Big deal - it's convection, that's all.
The was a paper in Science about 10 years ago concerning another method for causing water drops to move uphill. It involved creating a surface with a special coating that was decreasingly hydrophobic as one went uphill.