leaking pen wrote:
Depends. If they allow, say, 7 tons of water to fall into the well, and use it compress air which is subsequently used to push 2 tons of water up out of the well, the 2 tons can be pushed much higher than the original ground level of the 7 tons that fell in to start with.I was just sent this by a friend. anyone seen it before?
http://www.thepump.org/art3subcuttings.html
it seems plausible, yet im immediately thinking there is an ou issue
here. its essentially pumping water from the surface and back, yes
no? with no extra source of energy.
But then you need to get the extra 5 tons of water out of the basement before you can fire the pump up for another cycle, and there's no mention of a way to do this.
Presumably these people are anthropologists, not physicists. Perhaps it didn't occur to them that you can't use gravity to pump all 7 tons up to a greater height than the height at which it started, black magic and ZPE aside.
I'm also curious how the Egyptians, working with their dry-laid stones, managed to make sufficiently precise and strong air seals such that they could contain and manipulate air under "extremely high pressure".
