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by blueprint
4220 days ago
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Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can. Undisturbed, and notwithstanding internal vibrations, a spherical droplet of liquid will tend to stay in a sphere because not to do so would require an additional expenditure of energy, that is, in order to counteract those electrostatic forces. So the way I used the term efficient before is in the same way as how it's less costly in energy expenditure, i.e. more efficient, for a droplet to stay spherical. It's the same reasoning behind a number of other things we find in physics. So I'm not convinced that my statement about efficiency leading to appearance of natural structures is incorrect -- maybe more so a difference in how such an observation is commonly phrased. |
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Compare your electrostatic sphere example to my crater-lake example: lakes at a high gravitational potential are inefficient, it's less costly for the water to flow up the sides of a crater and down into the ocean. The reason that doesn't happen is because there is no mechanism for it to do so. If we look at liquid helium, there is a mechanism which allows it (the Onnes Effect) so it does happen.
> Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can
Yes, but the interesting part of the sentence is "as they can"; we can't just assume that a liquid's surface will be at minimal energy, since that would allow us to solve NP-complete problems with soap bubbles ( www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf ) :)