Water Flows Uphill

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC are reporting James Dyson's new garden feature, a waterfall with water flowing uphill. Apparently, he wanted to recreate an Escher drawing."

Interesting...

[Stephonovich]

Quite an elaborate optical illusion. The original drawing [worldofescher.com] is also worth looking at.

(-:Stephonovich:-)

Here's the image I think

[friedegg]

Waterfall [syol.com].

England's Dean Kamen

[SYFer]

Dyson inventions truly suck!

I think James Dyson belongs in the permanent Nerd Hall of Fame. His vacuum cleaner is one of the hands-down coolest devices I have ever owned. It represents the most significant advance in vacuum-cleaner technology in decades. See it at www.dyson.com. I would sooner downgrade my Mac than give up my Dyson. Well... maybe not, but I DO love my Dyson (in a geeky way, of course).

I demonstrate that sucker by turning it on (with the reservoir half full, mind?it uses no bags yet maintains consistent suction even when nearly full?the bane of most vacuums) and inviting the victim to insert a finger in the nozzle. The amount of suction is astounding. On top of that, he wound up having to defend his patent is court for years and finally won out against the big boys of the vacuum universe.

Dyson is a true genius and he?s a quirky Englishman to boot which is cool in my book. I have a funny feeling he?s not a /.?er, yet I consider him one of the all-time great inventors.

He is Englands Dean Kamen, methinks.

Uphill water flow at Disneyworld since 1971..

[droopus]

Since the 70's, there has been a cave [hiddenmickeys.org] on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyworld in which water appears to flow uphill.

The Imagineers did it cleverly with a slanted room and no point of reference. Not as geeky, but a really cool effect nonetheless which amazed me back in the day.

Re:Here's the image I think

[great throwdini]

Yes, that's the one. The BBC piece actually links to another representation of the same [mcescher.nl]. Their link is in the righthand sidebar adjacent to the article - not hard to miss.

More MC Escher drawing

[Michael's a Jerk!]

are at the World of Escher [worldofescher.com]. The man was a genius.

360 deg view of the waterfall here...

[mrklin]

A video would be much better but there is the iPix version [bbc.co.uk].

Re:It's not a new phenomenon

[pXgray]

RTFA, dude, it's just an optical illusion produced by a thin layer of water flowing DOWN the glass and bubbles on the inside moving upward. It produces the impression that the water is flowing up, even though it isn't. No laws of physics broken here.

Re:Nope

[great throwdini]

Wrong image. He's thinking of the image where there are soldiers walking up a set of stairs.

RTFAWC:

"One of these is an optical illusion that shows water going uphill and round and round the four sides of a square perpetually," [Dyson] says.

The WC is for 'With Care' - the BBC write-up mentions the marching soldiers in an aside. Dyson himself mentions no such work directly (as quoted).

Immediate dissapointment

[Malicious]

The first thing i would do having this invention in front of me, is to put a small floatation device (leaf, paper boat, etc...) at the bottom of the hill, to watch it float uphill.
Sadly, I would be completely dissapointed.

Re:The house at Disneyland...

[ahecht]

Actually, that was the Haunted Shack at Knott's Berry Farm, just down the road from Disneyland. It was torn down about a couple of years ago to make way for a thrill ride, which was also quickly torn down because it was unsafe. It is now a picnic area.

An identical copy of the Haunted Shack was built at the Calico Ghost Town where it was called the Mystery Shack, but it burned down in 2001 and is currently being rebuilt.

Re:Simple... it's antiwater

[Anonymous Coward]

If only antimatter was repelled by gravity. Antimatter is just normal matter with reverse charge and spin, so it obeys all normal physical laws. So-called "negative matter" would be repelled by gravity, but we don't know if it even exists or can be made.

Dyson didnt invent this , Derek Phillips did !

[Anonymous Coward]

If you RTFA

Derek Phillips, the Dyson engineer who spent 12 months building the feature, told BBC News Online that his head was spinning when he was given his brief.
"James came up to me and said he wanted this idea to make water go uphill. My initial reaction was to look for Paul Daniels' phone number. But I've had to become a bit of an illusionist myself."

so i think the credit goes to Mr Phillips for actually pulling it off, Dyson loves taking credit for other peoples work

Re:Simple... it's antiwater

[SEE]

The troubles here are two:

1) We have no experimental evidence as to how antimatter reacts to gravity (beond a couple of small ones where the externally-caused experimental error bars render the results statistically meaningless)

2) We don't know how gravity works. In GR, yes, antimatter has normal mass and reacts normally to gravity. But GR is not the last and final word on how gravity works, and several models otherwise fully consistent with known experimental data allow for anitmatter to be affected to a greater or lesser extent than normal matter by gravity, even to the point of sign reversal.

Since we have no experimental evidence and several potentially correct theories that give different answers, the only conclusion is that we don't know. The general opinion is that animatter is affected by gravity as normal matter, but we don't know that it is.

Re:England's Dean Kamen

[orbitalia]

yeah he is quite a quirky guy, he invented lots of things , the ball wheelbarrow (with a ball instead of a wheel at the front), and the sea truck, you can read about it all here [dyson.com]

Re:Immediate dissapointment

[trout_fish]

But then it wouldn't have the gentle, relaxing qualities that you would want in your garden. The idea is that it looks to be flowing naturally uphill, not being forced up it.

Re:Uphill water flow at Disneyworld since 1971..

[lendude]

There is/was? a similar hill optical illusion in a suburb called Forrestfield in Perth, Western Australia. Whack the car in neutral and up the noticeable hill you'd roll. Used to be called Magnetic Hill - the theory being there was some large lode stone doing the 'pulling' of the vehicle.

Was a rather unsafe place to drive - the road went thru' thickish scrub and you'd come around the top or bottom corners of the hill and find some car creeping in the middle of the road, sometimes with open doors and no-one inside it - the occupants would be out on the side of the road watching it go 'uphill'.

Electric Brae, it's called.

[Gordonjcp]

It's just north of Ayr, near a place called Dunure. Quite a bizarre thing, too. Website here [demon.co.uk]

Re:Simple... it's antiwater

[Alsee]

We don't have experimental proof yet, but we have overwhelming reason to believe antimatter fall down just like matter. You can work it out based on hysical constants and conservation of energy in a matter/antimatter annihilation. It is explained in this physics FAQ. [ucr.edu]

If antimatter is repelled by gravity then you either have a violation of conservation of energy, or physics constants are not constant.

-

Re:England's Dean Kamen

[apdt]

Have a look at this [dyson.com] timeline...

Dyson invented his Vacuum cleaner in around 1983.

Re:Liquid that really flows uphill...kind of

[panurge]

Liquid helium at close to absolute zero. It doesn't flow uphill, it displays enormous capillary effect which can pull it right out of a container.

Re:Sigh...

[KITT_KATT!*]

... And besides if he's keeping it a secret, by definition he _can't_ have filed a patent. Patents were originally created to encourage people to make the design of their inventions public. You can hold exclusive rights over your invention forever if you keep the design a secret. But if the secret leaks out, you're screwed. On the other hand, if you make the design public through the patent process, the government will enforce your exclusive rights for you for a set period of time.

Magnetic Hill and Reversing Falls.

[Viking5150]

You are referring to the Reversing Falls [new-brunswick.net] in Saint John, NB.

Also, you are referring to The Magnetic Hill [magnetichill.com] in Moncton, NB.

I've seen both. The Magnetic Hill is a cool illusion. The Reversing Falls isn't worth the drive. It looks cooler in pictures. It's really a reversing river more than anything.

Re:Simple... it's antiwater

[misterpies]

There can be no doubt, for solid physical reasons, that antiparticles behave identically to regular particles when it comes to gravity.

First of all, the only relevant physical quantity to determine how something is affected by gravity is its mass (and equivalently, in relativity, energy). That's practically the definition of gravity -- the force one body exerts on another by virtue of its mass. In physicist speak, the gravitational field "couples" to mass/energy. Any force having an origin in some other physical quantity is by definition not gravity.

Now we have plenty of experimental evidence -- eg from particle accelerators that antimatter has positive mass, just like regular matter. Indeed, antiparticles have IDENTICAL masses to their corresponding real particles. Therefore they must be affected in the same way as regular matter by gravity.

Secondly, in both relativistic and quantum frameworks, gravity can only be understood if it is always attractive. In other words, mass can only be positive. In quantum terms, this comes out of the fact that gravity must be "spin 2" field. (There's a nice book by Feynman on his attempts to come up with a quantum theory of gravity that explains why it has to be spin 2).

Thirdly, according to quantum field theory the vacuum is filled with "virtual" particles and antiparticles -- that's the zero-point energy of the vacuum. Now the whole point about the vacuum is that it's the lowest possible energy state. If anti particles had negative mass-energy, they'd be in a lower energy state than the vacuum, which means that they'd be stable compared to the vacuum and would not decay back into the vacuum.
If that were true, the universe would long ago have filled up with antiparticles...

Re:Grammar nazi

[RichardX]

Sorry, the Duh! is on you.
The gramattical guide book to which the parent refers is from the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy (think about it. How often do you find a grammer guide for time travel in your local bookshop?)

--- quote ---
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that
of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no
problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a
broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is
also no problem about changing the course of history - the course
of history does not change because it all fits together like a
jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things
they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the
end.

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main
work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time
Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you
for instance how to describe something that was about to happen
to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward
two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described
differently according to whether you are talking about it from
the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the
further future, or a time in the further past and is further
complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst
you are actually travelling from one time to another with the
intention of becoming your own father or mother.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified
Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up:
and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond
this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this
tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the
term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered
not to be.

Also Found In Nature

[CowboyBob500]

Those who have visited Ayrshire in Scotland will most likely have visited Electric Brae, which is just about the wierdest place I've ever been. Things roll uphill here, or at least appear to.

Here's a link [demon.co.uk], and here's another [a-h-a.co.uk].

Bob

Re:Uphill water flow at Disneyworld since 1971..

[evenprime]

There is also an optical illusion near there in..Moncton i think? You go to the base of the hill, put your car in neutral, and your car will roll up the hill. Its an optical illusion, you are actually rolling downhill, but you look and it looks uphill, no amount of thinking its downhill dispells that.

There are many places like this [adelaide.edu.au]:

• Mystery Spot Road, off Branciforte Dr. Santa Cruz, CA, USA. A spot 50m in diameter in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains
• Mystery Spot, Putney Road, Benzie County, Michigan, USA.
• Gravity Hill, Northwest Baltimore County, USA. along a public road that ran through the Soldier's Delight environmental area.
• Gravity Hill, Mooresville, Southwest Indianapolis, USA. Located off SR 42 on the South side of Mooresville.
• Gravity Road, Ewing Road exit ramp off Route 208, Franklin Lakes, USA.
• Mystery Hill, Blowing Rock, hwy 321, Carolina, USA.
• Confusion Hill, Idelwild Park, Ligonier, Pennsylvania, USA.
• Gravity Hill, off of State Route 96 just south of New Paris, Bedford County, Pennsylvania, USA.
• Gravity Hill (near White's Hill) , just South of Rennick Road, on County Truck U, South of Shullsburg, in LaFayette County, Wisconsin, USA
• Oregon Vortex, near Gold-Hill, Grants Pass, Oregon, USA.
• Spook Hill, North Wales Drive, North Avenue, Lake Wales, Florida, USA.
• Spook Hill, Gapland Road just outside Burkittsville, Gapland (Frederick County), Maryland, USA.
• Magnetic Hill, Near Neepawa in Manitoba, Canada.
• Magnetic Mountain, just off the Trans Canada highway, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.
• Gravity Hill, on McKee Rd. just before Ledgeview Golf Course in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada.
• Electric Brae, on the A719, Near Croy Bay, South of Ayr, Ayeshire, Scotland.
• Anti-Gravity Hill, Straws Lane Road, Wood-End, Near hanging rock, Victoria, Australia
• Morgan Lewis Hill, St Andrew, Barbados.
• Hill South of Rome, in Colli Albani, near Frascati, Italy.
• Malveira da Serra, on N247 coast road West of Lisbon, Portugal
• Mount Penteli, on a road to Mount Penteli, Athens, Greece
• Mount Halla, on the 1.100 highway a few miles south of the airport, near Mount Halla, on the island of Cheju Do, South Korea

There's another place named "spook hill" with this illusion in Florida [historiclakewales.com]

Re:It's not a new phenomenon

[Ratphace]

This was achieved a LONG time ago by William Mulholland. In many places this aqueduct actually flows the water uphill. As water superintendent for the City of Los Angeles, Mulholland was faced with a critical situation. The little city of LA was running out of water and by 1903 would need to find an alternative source of water if it was going to have a future in the desert. Mulholland was informed of the Owens River, some two hundred miles to the north, and by 1904 he began acquiring water rights from the river for the City of Los Angeles. The plan had been to divert water through the desert in order to sustain Los Angeles indefinitely. Funded through public bond issues, the massive project of moving water had attracted the support of people all across the United States, except those living in the Owens Valley/Mono Lake area. The population boom that followed the completion of the aqueduct was three times greater than Mulholland had imagined. The paradise created by Mulholland when be brought water to the desert was, and still is today, a monster that feeds on itself: the growth cycle will always require more and more amounts of water to satisfy the need. The expansion of population in LA in the early 1900's brought about the same problems we see today. Cities are growing faster than they can get water to sustain themselves, but the larger and faster a population grows, the easier it becomes to take water from someone else. Los Angeles has since tapped the Feather River in the 1960's with the California State Aqueduct and created a second diversion from Mono Lake to bring LA twice as much water as before (and dropping the level of the lake some 2 feet per year). In 1988, after the people of Mono Lake sued Los Angeles, the California Supreme Court ruled that LA had to look elsewhere to find water.

In Montana there is a river that is ...

[danieleran]

"a mile wide, an inch deep and runs uphill," as Lewis and Clark described it.

It's the Powder River, runs into the Yellowstone to the Missouri. There are places it appears to run uphill because the wind blows the surface backward. It's generally pretty shallow, hence 'the inch deep' and, well, the name.

There is no link I can point to on the web. Not even Google knows about it. Montana is very unwired.

Re:Dyson didnt invent this , Derek Phillips did !

[Anonymous Coward]

If Phillips works for Dyson, then presumably Dyson ownz all of Phillips' work. At least, all the work that he officially does for Dyson's company. Standard IP contract by the sounds of it.

Therefore it is Dyson's water feature, even if one of his employees did all the hard work. ;-)

Warning

[Idarubicin]

> ... vacuum cleaner...

Cool. Finally something for the female geeks.

Yes. Scientific research has demonstrated that male geeks should stay away from vacuum cleaners. Some cautionary citations:

Forrest, J.B. and Gillenwater, J.Y. "The hand vacuum cleaner - friend or foe?" J. Urology vol. 128 no. 4, p. 829 (1982).

Benson, R.C. "Vacuum cleaner injury to penis - a common urologic problem". Urology vol. 25 no. 1, p. 41 (1985).

Lewi, H., Drury, J.K., Monsour, M. "Vacuum cleaner injury to penis". Urology vol. 26 no. 3, p. 321 (1985).

Imami, R.H., Kemal, M. "Vacuum cleaner use in autoerotic death". Am. J. Forensic Med. Path. vol. 9 no. 3, p. 246 (1988).

Be afraid.

Re:Magnetic Hill

[SheldonYoung]

See the following page for a list of more of the similar type of illusion:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/ro ll -uphill.html

Re:Tidal Bore was better 30 years ago.

[Clover_Kicker]

A lot of people have a lot to say about the causeway, they've have been fighting about it for 30 years.

I think the "rich landowners" thing is pretty funny, Moncton isn't known for its wealth. The houses along that artifical lake are pretty middle class, we're not talking about millionaires. Also, while those guys oppose *removing* the causeway, they didn't have anything to do with *building* it in the first place.

Also, as the linked article points out, the fishermen downstream oppose removing the causeway.

Lastly, the "let's get rid of the causeway" people conveniently forget about the old garbage dump on the banks of the river just downstream from the causeway. (A lot of really smart environmental decisions were made in Moncton in the 60's, can you tell?) If they remove the causeway there will be a lot more erosion along that stretch of the river, unearthing God knows what. So any plan to remove the causeway had better budget for shoring up the banks of the old dump.

Just to be balanced, the people who want the causeway to be removed have a website here [petitcodiac.org].

Manufacturing in asian countries

[jesterzog]

shame he shut down his UK factory and moved all the production to the far east. He was a cool guy before that but now he's just another greedy corporate whore who just happens to have cool geeky ideas.

I was at a recent seminar given by him in Wellington, New Zealand. Considering he said so much about how he wanted to promote invention, manufacturing and practical innovation in western countries, someone asked him about that.

His reasoning was that for as much as he wants to manufacture there, it simply isn't feasible anymore because the whole manufacturing infrastructure has gone to hell in the last few decades, at least as far as what he needs. Western people don't invest in goods and manufacturing because there isn't much perceived gain, so reasonable industries for them just don't exist.

At his current factories, it's possible to source all of the necessary parts from within a very short distance (think 20 minutes travel) from the manufacturing base. In western countries throughout Europe and elsewhere, this simply isn't possible. There are things he needs that nobody nearby makes, and it makes it a real pain to run any serious manufacturing business.

For all that, one of the messages that came through at the seminar was just how disappointed he was that investors didn't see manufacturing as a viable investment.