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."

I want one on my desk :-)

[newsdee]

That would look really cool if it was a small widget-type zen thing, so I can have one on my desk to contemplate while trying to be inspired. :-)

i have previously achieved this same illusion

[Miguel de Icaza]

but using a different technique. I used a strobe on a small waterfall in a dark room- this works in the same way you can sometimes see car wheels spinning in the wrong dirrection.

When i saw dysons outdoor version while touring the flower show I hoped he had somehow used lasers to implement the strobe technique outdoors in full daylight - that would be cool. But no he is just using pumped air - no surprise really considering hes a vacuum genius :^)

Obligatory POV-Ray Reference!

[PovRayMan]

Check this animation out from an old IRTC round.

http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2000-07-15/h20fa ll.mpg [irtc.org]

(setting up a BT would nice for this so IRTC.ORG doesn't get bandwidth destroyed. I'd do it, but I should be really studying for final exams :-) )

Notes
http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2000-07-15/h20fa ll.txt [irtc.org]
Comments
http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2000-07-15/comme nts/h20fall.comments [irtc.org]

From here

http://www.irtc.org/anims/2000-07-15.html [irtc.org]

All credit for the animation goes to Joe Wise.

This Bring Back Fond Memories...

[istartedi]

This brings back fond memories of an illusion I first saw when I was a kid. I saw it in Springfield Mall. It was put on by a plumbing contractor, or a hot tub installer, or somebody like that.

It was a faucet, seemingly suspended in mid-air, with an endless supply of water coming from it.

I marvelled at it for several minutes, pondering how it could be done, yet my child's mind, while knowing it wasn't real, was beyond fathoming any art or science that could accomplish this.

Leaning closer to inspect it, my suspicions were aroused by the strange apparatus in the catch basin, but I still needed a full explanation from an adult:

All you do is run a pipe up to the faucet. The pipe supports the faucet. The faucent contains a concavity that directs the water to flow in a hollow cylinder that hides the pipe and completes the illusion.

You can buy table-top models of this, with yellow-dyed water flowing into a mug of beer.

Kudos to this guy though, for taking the concept and wedding it to Escher in a novel way.

Re:Interesting...

[Paradise Pete]

none of the water looks like it's flowing up in that direction.

If it looked like it's flowing up then it wouldn't "work." You follow the water from the waterfall down, then as it flows horizontally for a while, and everything seems normal, except that you've somehow gotten back to the top. At that point you get the standard "WTF?" Escher moment.

Re:Uphill water flow at Disneyworld since 1971..

[anethema]

I always thought the most famous of these things was at the bay of Fundy. The level of the tide rises higher than the river level and causes REAL uphill rapids, and a semi illusionary uphill waterfall.

I havent seen it myself, but I understand its quite a mind bender to see.

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.

Some very neet stuff, and example of an Eschery world in real life.

Nice for your home garden

[MikeyNg]

That thing would look awesome in your garden. I'd buy one. (If I had the money, and if I had a garden to put it in.)

I'd also want to put one of those non-linear water wheels. You have buckets on a wheel and they get filled up by a source of water. As they fill, they begin to rotate the wheel. However, the buckets have holes on the bottom. This causes the water in the buckets to flow out. What results is a wheel that moves in a decidedly non-linear fashion. That'd be a nice companion to the Escher waterfall. :)

Liquid that really flows uphill...kind of

[valloq]

This reminded me of something I read in the paper years back, turns out back in 1996 some scientists were awarded [nobel.se] the Nobel Prize for discovering a liquid that actually flows uphill, some sort of special property about temperatures approaching absolute zero that cause liquid to move in a coordinated manner and lack all inner friction. That's the extent of the stuff I can understand, check the article out for yourselves.

Re:Dyson didnt invent this , Derek Phillips did !

[Anonymous Coward]

no no, Escher invented it then Dyson told Phillips to build it, Phillips had the job of overcoming the hurdles, so Dysons involvement seems to be only financial oh and taking the credit of course

Didn't they do this with a gradient of teflon?

[Darwiniac]

I remember seeing this ridiculous pop science show that was trying to come up with any evidence to support various bible stories. In one of them the tried to support the splitting of the red sea by showing some researchers who got water to flow up a gradient of decreasingly hydrophobic material (teflon I think). I remember thinking, "Oh yeah, Moses was an expert in poly-flourinated chemistry!" Does this ring a bell for anyone? The teflon gradient that is, not the cooky show.

Almost as good as...

[UnixRevolution]

Those Escher Lego Pictures [slashdot.org] from a while back.

Escher's work is damn cool. :)

Seen water running uphill for real

[deniea]

Some years back I was on holliday in Ayrshire, Schotland. There is a hill called 'Electric Brae [theranchscotland.co.uk]' where water runs uphill!

This is only on optical illusion, but one made by nature! Google has a few mentions [google.com] of it too

Re:England's Dean Kamen

[Alan Partridge]

" His vacuum cleaner is one of the hands-down coolest devices I have ever owned."

You've obviously never owned a decent vacuum cleaner, then. I actually went to the bother of testing the claims of Dyson's machine against my bag-using Miele - true to the claims, Dyson's vac had the same suction at the end of the test as it did at the beginning, unfortunately, it had 1/8th of the suction of the Miele when the Miele had a new bag, and 1/2 when the Miele's bag was full and the bag change light had come on. It also cost over twice as much money to buy than the Miele, was poorly made in Malaysia rather than properly made in Germany, and allowed significantly MORE dust to be expelled back into the room.

But it doesn't lose suction...

It really did suck just as hard when full as when empty. What a piece of crap.

Magnetic Hill

[brunes69]

In Moncton [greatermoncton.com], NB, Canada (where I was born), there is a tourist attraction called Magnetic Hill [tourismnbcanada.com]. It is a really cool experience where you park your car on a hill, and it (seemengly) rolls *up* the hill. This was not designed by "imagineers" or anyone else, it is a natrually occuring illusion... something to do with the way the land grades there in relation to the center of earths gravity. Water also flows uphill there.. totally naturally. Its the only place I know of in the world where this happens.

Water has been flowing uphill for years . . .

[CuriousGeorge113]

The laws of physics have been defiled for years over at Gravity Hill [gravityhill.com].

Where have you been?

Re:This is..

[FFFish]

More true than you might know.

Location: Hell's Gate, a set of rapids in the Fraser River, BC, created by an engineering mistake while blasting for the CN (?) rail line.

Time: Earlier part of the century. Last century.

Problem: Salmon can't fight their way past the rapids. This is a disaster: the Fraser is one of the "motherlode" salmon rivers. It's an ecological disaster of such magnitude that even those living in the early part of the century recognized it. (Remember that this is a time when burning down entire forests to clear the ground for gold exploration was acceptable!)

Solution: Assist the fish. Using a big net, scoop the fish up at the bottom of the rapids, raise them tens of feet up in the air, and dump them in a sluice box which inclines down to the top of the rapids. Water is being piped from higher up the river to flood the sluice.

Result: The fish, dumped into the sluice, try to continue to swim upstream against the sluice water. Consequently, they swim out the high end of the sluice, plummeting back into the river... beneath the rapids.

Damn!

(Eventually a weir system of complicated breakwaters and eddies and multi-level entrances and all that was built of concrete. It slows the water enough that the fish can swim against the current.)

That isn't so impressive

[NewsWatcher]

When I was in Italy, not far from Rome, there is an entire mountain where not just water, but everything appears to be rolling uphill.
Couldn't find any links in Google on it, but I think the Italians called in La strada contrario (the contrary street).
All over the road cars are pulled over, as drivers take off the handbrake and laugh as their car rolls uphill.
People tried to explain to me how it works, but my Italian wasn't good enough.
That didn't use any bubbles to create the illusion either!

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

[phliar]

... turns out back in 1996 some scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering a liquid that actually flows uphill, some sort of special property about temperatures approaching absolute zero...

Superfluidity of liquid helium (He4) below about 2K (that's 2 kelvin above absolute zero) has been known for a very long time -- since around 1952 or '53 I think. Helium had been liquefied in 1927, but superfluidity wasn't noticed till the 50s.It's a quantum phenomenon. These 1996 Nobel laureates showed it in He3.