On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Michel Jullian wrote: > Bill, > > A friend just sent me this link: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpBxCnHU8Ao > Beautiful video. The bumps at the beginning (threshold field presumably) > may be relevant to your airthreads phenomenon.
Such bumps are known to arise with distilled de-ionized (DI) water. But for tap water, there is no molecular alignment because the e-fields within the water are zero when opposite ions are attracted to the surface, serving as a conductive shield. > Here the field is > magnetic rather than electric and the fluid is magnetically polarized I've played with a large quantity of ferrofluid. The "spines" are very similar to the spines seen when a magnet picks up quantities of iron powder. One huge blob of iron powder is unstable, and instead the blob breaks into two spines which repel each other, then those break up as well, ideally forming an array. (Oddly enough, ferrofluid forms square arrays of spines, rather than hexagonal close-packing.) > (ferromagnetic fluid, contains tiny magnetic dipoles) rather than > electrically polarized (water molecules are tiny electric dipoles) but a > similar goose bumping phenomenon could be expected in your experiment, > although obviously on a smaller scale as otherwise the bumps would have > been visible. > Wrt the hollow you unambiguously observed by laser > reflection, might it have been a "valley" between several bumps or the > inside of a volcano-like structure? I guess I wasn't clear enough. When a relatively huge flow of "electric wind" blows from a metal needle, it blasts a huge hole in the mist layer (many cm diameter) with lots of easily observed turbulent stirring of the fog. And at the same time, it pushes a valley into the water. This is not the "air threads" or filaments I observed. Instead it's a high-current phenomenon on the scale of microamps or hundreds of nanoamps. It only appears when a metal needle is held appx 10cm from the water surface. The "air threads" or fibers which create mm-wide holes in the fog... those don't create any easily-detected changes in the water surface. These "threads" are created by holding a sharp, high-resistance non-metal object appx 30cm from the water surface. I used carbon fibers, torn paper edges, and human hairs (especially eyelashes) to create the thread-like phenomena. I only conducted a brief test when looking for water surface deflections. Perhaps an experiment more carefully performed than my own will detect a pimple or a valley. (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 425-222-5066 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
