Religion
In reply to the discussion: Indian skeptic faces 3 year prison sentence for explaining dripping crucifix [View all]struggle4progress
(118,282 posts)for a phenomenon, then waving your hands instead of providing the explanation
I expect nobody in this forum doubts there is a good scientific explanation for the water dripping: I merely indicate that I have not yet seen a detailed schematic of the setup that convinces me I have been given the explanation
Edamaruku, of course, may somewhere have provided the correct explanation: I cannot tell because of the vagueness of the reporting (and perhaps also because some of it is in Hindi)
But it is not enough to say "capillary action" without knowing where the water source is relative to the drip
Here is a nice photo from Wikipedia showing capillary wetting of a concrete block:
I say you cannot engineer a protrusion on the upper half of the block, from which water will continually drip down after rising into the block by capillary attraction, unless there is some other continuing supply of energy: for otherwise you would have the makings of a perpetual motion machine. Another way to say this is: the very same energetic considerations, that drew the water up into the porous block, hold the water in the block and discourage it from leaking back out at a higher level than it entered