Wouldn't it evaporate in like 5 seconds, then? Also, drainage would be the easiest thing ever. Don't even need a slanted floor.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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That'd be awful. You want the stuff in water out of your house, not precipitated all over the floor.
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Sounds like a lot less cleaning in the house as it would just evaporate in less than a minute?
High humidity tends to ruin a lot of houses/construction materials over time, but you'll likely first notice random spores
I mean you can just ventilate whenever you spill something.
The larger problem would be the entire water-based ecosystem.
We need xkcd to explain what would happen on a large scale if water was like this.
You could also clean it by putting a cloth in the lowest point it would run to so this sounds like a win to me
i think without surface tension it would also just fall out of the cloth as soon as you lift it, because nothing would wick against gravity. in fact of your floor is pourous at all, i reckon the water would just immediately all flow further down and you’d be left with a dry floor.
Oil doesn’t have surface tension and it stays in the cloth. At a certain point it’s not surface tension that keeps liquids together but friction.
Says my uneducated ass.
oils have low surface tension, i believe a true no-surface tension liquid is as impossible as a true frictionless surface.
i didn’t consider friction though! i think the rag would still dry out completely pretty quick, but you might have a few seconds while the water falls out depending on how tight the mesh is?
i dunno, this is a real whacky thing to think about!
Without surface tension it would stick to whatever thing attracts it more. And a normal piece of cloth attracts water way more than a normal non-carpet floor.
But it also wouldn't flow freely as the GP expects either. Some oils have almost no surface tension, and they are famously a nightmare to clean up.
As a positive, the water would evaporate faster.
the cloth attracts it because of the capillary action pulling water into the gaps therein, and capillary action relies on surface tension! i think without outside forces like suction, the liquid in this scenario would never flow against gravity.
i think hahah
Surface tension doesn't tell you anything about the cloth-water interface.
i mean it’s literally why liquids wick into cloth
good news: it wouldn't be
Your floor would have to be supernaturally flat and level for that to happen.
the world is crooked ! reality is a lie !
Lambs to the cosmic slaughter!
ah yes ! that's the one
is this show still any good? after roilland was kicked out for being a creep i mean.
As someone who didn't like most of seasons 5 and 6, yes, it's gotten better. There are some really good episodes in 7 and 8. There are still duds, but the quality ratio is better than it was.
I liked it through the last season I watched, which was there season after the big gap. 5, I think? I don't watch a lot of TV, and I don't fanboi very well; was that after he left?
But that 2 micron puddle would also evaporate in 2 microseconds!
We would probably just not exist as liquids that want to hold together are pretty essential. Even if you just imagine blood not leaving your body through the tiniest nick.
I mean maybe? Surface tension play a role in blood staying on the wound, but it’s the blood itself that clots. I think the bigger issue would be your eyes, but maybe evolution creates a light sensor that wasn’t developed underwater…
I’m at a loss. In my heart of hearts I know we all die if water doesn’t tend to hold together, but I can’t think of WHY. Call xkcd.
Wouldn’t it just be a superfluid at that point? Those things are ungovernable. We’d have way more problems that just spilled puddles. They crawl out of the beakers on their own. It’d be an absolute nightmare.
My bad superfluids are 0 viscosity not surface tension carry on we’re safe.
It cleans not only your floor, but also the ceilings and floors of the neighbors which are living below.
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I heard about superfluid crawling out of a container. But I wonder in this case, what works the fluid against the gravity upward the wall of the container?
Capillary action; which is a combination of adhesion, cohesion, and surface tension and for superfluids the additional ack of friction.
Unfortunately, if cohesion is removed from water, this might drastically change if the water can crawl up the container (the details would be based on the specific physics of this imaginary universe).
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Technically even without surface tension, the microscopically small deviations in elevation in your floor, combined with evaporation and absorption would actually mean you would have a dry floor almost immediately.
Surface tension is just one aspect of the molecular bonds that cause water to accumulate, and if there were no surface tension that would mean those bonds would have to be nonexistent and thus water would not be able to condense into a liquid in the first place.
Ok, nerd....
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In this case human dwellings would be built to accomodate for this, since it's basically impossible to wipe up any water puddle. Builders would have to come up with some technology (drains in every room, floor heating as the norm to evaporate the 2µm water film etc.) or risk water damage. So you'd never have to wipe up a puddle since your apartment would have been built in a way that allows for the cleaning of water in other ways.
That's how water works in videogames
🤔
Water just doesn't work in minecraft
🤔
"Everything is coated with a fine layer of shit." https://yourwildlife.org/2014/07/the-tip-of-the-gutberg-the-worlds-first-map-of-the-patina-of-feces/
Probably our bodies would instantly collapse into ooze like that guy in the first X-Men.
Would capillary action still work, or does it depend on surface tension? I'm thinking about superfluids. Would the water stop at covering the floor?
You can try it yourself by adding a drop of dish soap to some water. Capillary action would still work and the water would evaporate long before covering the entire floor.
Capillary rise depends on surface tension, gamma. If surface tension was 0, there would be no capillary rise. Soap decreases surface tension, but it's not 0.
Oh nevermind then. I just looked it up and came across the so-called Rollin film. I don't know if that only appears in helium or if superfluid water would be subject to that effect as well. I wonder how that would impact its behaviour.
What if each H~2~O molecule was coated in a hydrophobic substance?
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