Perhaps I should confess here the background of my question: I'm thinking that my facetious way of explaining megafauna mass extinction via "spontaneous reversal of Earth's gravitational field" would be a good candidate for a BAHFest talk at some point. A BAHFest talk is supposed to include some real science along with the bogus kind, so, in addition to citing dimensional scaling laws to explain why falling up and then falling down would be much more injurious to big animals than to small ones, I'll want to discuss R-T instability and its relevance to the question "What happened to the oceans during this postulated event?" See bahfest. <http://bahfest.org>com if you don't know what BAHFest is. Jim Propp On Tuesday, August 12, 2014, Tom Rokicki <rokicki@gmail.com <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','rokicki@gmail.com');>> wrote:
Interesting things happen as the diameter of the opening decreases. The plate might be thought of as artificially increasing surface tension.
-tom
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 9:20 AM, meekerdb <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote:
On 8/12/2014 1:39 AM, Gareth McCaughan wrote:
On 12/08/2014 05:14 <x-apple-data-detectors://5>, James Propp wrote:
Say I have a jar full of water covered by a thin plate. Then I turn the jar upside down, holding the plate firmly against the lip of the jar to prevent water from spilling. Then I whisk away the plate so that
instead
of the plate pushing against the water, only the air beneath the jar is pushing upward.
Of course, the water will leave the jar. But what will the geometry of the process be? The water can't leave as a cylindrical slug; intuitively, it seems that the process has instability, so that spontaneous fingering in the air-water interface will break the initial cylindrical symmetry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh%E2%80%93Taylor_instability (I think).
Things are made of atoms. Atoms obey quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics includes randomness. So symmetries get broken.
Brent Meeker
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