Religion
In reply to the discussion: Indian skeptic faces 3 year prison sentence for explaining dripping crucifix [View all]struggle4progress
(118,282 posts)Please look again at the diagram I gave:
||| permeable material
|||
|xx\
|x\x\ protrusion and drip
|x|
|x|
|x|
|x|
xxxx water puddle xxxx
In such a setup, water can indeed rise from a lower level in a hydrophilic porous material by capillary forces. But (I say) without some other energy input, water cannot rise from a lower level into the porous material and then drip off from a point higher than the water source: otherwise, one could assemble an array of such devices, collect the dripping water, and use the collected water to turn a paddlewheel continually, harnessing a constant stream of energy in violation of the prohibition against perpetual machines: the final kinetic energy, of the falling of the water drop, must come from somewhere, by the conservation of energy. This energy cannot be harvested for free from the surface interactions of the water in the pore space of the permeable material