**Floating Water Bridge - Elmar Fuchs (SETI Talks) — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/floating-water-bridge-elmar-fuchs-seti-talks/

SETI Institute talk by Elmar Fuchs on the 'floating water bridge': how high voltage across two beakers of pure water forms a stable suspended water cylinder, with optical, pH, UV and neutron scatterin

## Key Takeaways

- The floating water bridge is a reproducible phenomenon in pure water under high voltage, documented since 1893.
- The bridge can transport water between two beakers while remaining stable for a time.
- Its stability is sensitive to voltage, current, geometry and bridge size.
- Mechanistic explanations (ion networks, nanobubbles, structural change) remain unresolved.
- Neutron and UV scattering so far indicate mostly bulk-like water, leaving the phenomenon open for further study.

## What the video covers

- Introduction by SETI Institute host presenting speaker Elmar Fuchs of VETUS (Netherlands), a water research collaboration of European universities, governments and industry.
- Historical background: William George Armstrong described the floating water bridge in 1893 using two glasses of pure water joined by a cotton thread.
- Modern experimental setup: two platinum electrodes in deionized water beakers, a 15 kV DC supply, a voltage divider, a 42 nF capacitor and a constant current of about 0.5 mA.
- High-speed video shows electrospray-like droplet ejection that develops into a stable water connection, which can be stretched to about 2.5 cm while carrying water between beakers.
- Bridge stability depends on voltage, current, beaker geometry and bridge size; a 5 mm bridge failed to remain stable.
- Thermal observations show the bridge is warmer (about 50 °C) than the surrounding water (about 25 °C).
- Hypotheses for the mechanism include ion-network transport, nanobubble formation and structural changes in the water.
- Optical tests with dyes and polarization were used to probe flow and light-guiding behavior in the bridge.
- Inelastic UV and neutron scattering measurements suggest the bridge water looks largely like bulk water, though its structure may differ.
- The speaker frames the phenomenon as a tool for investigating unknown water properties rather than a finished explanation.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction and speaker background
2. 03:00 Historical origins: Armstrong's 1893 experiment
3. 04:00 Experimental setup and high-speed observations
4. 07:10 Stability, voltage and geometry parameters
5. 13:00 Temperature, pH and transport hypotheses
6. 22:20 Optical and polarization investigations
7. 35:00 Neutron and UV scattering results
8. 48:20 Conclusions and closing discussion

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the floating water bridge?

It is a stable cylinder of pure water that forms between two beakers when a high DC voltage is applied through electrodes in the water. The speaker shows it can be stretched to several centimeters while water flows through it.

Who first described this phenomenon and when?

William George Armstrong described a version of it in 1893, using two glasses of pure water connected by a cotton thread and a steam-driven high-voltage generator.

What do the scattering experiments show?

Neutron and inelastic UV scattering measurements so far look mostly like bulk water, though the speaker notes the bridge water appears different and its structure may change, so the question remains open.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:11

Speaker A

[Music] [Music] yeah I'm freedom and fr I'm with Institute and with M ases and uh today we have a very outstanding speaker with an outstanding topic that will blow your minds away if you think you know something about water just wait for an

00:51

Speaker A

hour and you will know more um Elmer fols I met him last year at the Water conference in Vermont and I was so intrigued by the presentation that he gave at that time that I thought it might be a good idea to bring him

01:05

Speaker A

here and he also has some existing contacts with Stanford and is familiar with the area so um he will talk about uh the Water Bridge very interesting phenomenon elmar is originally from Austria he got his PhD in um Claren for

01:24

Speaker A

grass in grass and um working on LEDs on light emitting diodes and continued to work after uh his PhD and then moved to vetus which is a interesting Research Center in Holland dedicated to water water questions in a very broad sense

01:43

Speaker A

and it is as I understand a collaboration between uh various universities in Europe uh several European governments and Industry and uh they are attaching their interest they are working on all questions related to understand water and its availability

02:04

Speaker A

and its property so today please welcome our speaker Elma FS from the Netherlands thank [Applause] you I should mention that I have to catch a flight at 2:15 so at 1:00 sharp I have to rush out the door and Adrian

02:23

Speaker A

will take over the discussion well thank you very much vman for this nice introduction thank you also Adrien for inviting me here to give me the chance to present a little bit about our research on the phenomenon which is called the floating water

02:42

Speaker A

bridge to give you a short outline of what I will be talking about I will give you a very brief historical overview of the phenomenon I will talk about some Optical investigations and the pH value some recent results on inelastic UV

02:56

Speaker A

scattering some results on Newton's scattering and I will try to come up with some conclusions on how this phenomenon I'm going to tell you about could actually work the the phenomenon is very very old in the year 1893 William George Armstrong gave a

03:17

Speaker A

speech in front of the literary and philosophical Society of Newcastle and as a part of the speech he said amongst other experiments I Hit Upon a very remarkable one taking two wine glass is filled to the brim with chemically pure

03:32

Speaker A

water I connected the glasses by a cotton thread CED up in one glass and having its shorter end dipped into the other glass we don't know why he did that he but this was when these times when people were experimenting with

03:44

Speaker A

electricity and water it's 1893 on turning on the current this was but at that time a steam drien fundra generator this was the only means by which they could generate high voltage by turning on the current the coil

03:59

Speaker A

threat was rapidly drawn out of the glass containing it and the whole thread deposited into the other leaving and this is important leaving for a few seconds a rope of water suspended between the lips of the two glasses we

04:14

Speaker A

tried to recreate this experiment and as you can see in this video here are two beakers here's a cotton thread and as we turn on our current we can at least see form a watery connection being formed but in our case the cotton thread is not

04:28

Speaker A

drawn in to one glass it doesn't matter because nowadays the uh setup that we are using is actually quite different I'm sorry I'm not used to this uh remote control so I pressed the wrong button obviously it took me a slide back

04:45

Speaker A

instead of a slide forward doesn't matter just press it again quickly I will try okay here we are experimental setup what we have is we have two beers Platinum electrodes we fill these beers with a chemically pure water which Is

05:08

Speaker A

deionized water and in addition to that we have a this is very important a high voltage power supply here 15 Kilts DC power supply you can also see here a voltage divider which enables us to measure the voltage with a low voltage

05:24

Speaker A

instrument and in order to smooth out spikes in the voltage we have a 42 nanat capacitor for most of the experiments here unless I tell you otherwise the current was kept constant at 0.5 milliamps if you switch on the current

05:39

Speaker A

you have a watery connection being formed between the beakers and more than that if you put to balances below the beakers you can measure that water is actually being transported through this phenomenon but now enough of these schemes let's watch a video of the

05:53

Speaker A

actual thing here you see the two beers this is a highspeed video slow motion factor is 120 and as we turn on our voltage you see that there's a discharge and the water starts to move vividly in both beers you

06:07

Speaker A

see droplets being ejected you see water columns being formed this is very similar to what is known nowadays in uh electr spraying of liquids or Electro spraying of water and this will continue now or this would continue until a v

06:24

Speaker A

connection between the two beakers is formed let me just skip a little bit of this video and go to the end of it where we have two droplets here sitting on the edge of the beakers they are ejecting

06:35

Speaker A

Nano droplets now in a so-called pulsating mode this is well understood this is electr spray but what is not understood is what will happen now suddenly a connection will form between these two peers but this is not a water

06:48

Speaker A

Bridge the Water Bridge is what is about to become out of this small connection because once this connection is formed you see that it gains a size you see that actually water is Flowing from this video you can see

07:05

Speaker A

actually it's flowing in both directions it's becoming thicker it's becoming more stable and a watery connection between the beakers is formed the interesting thing now is as you can see from this video which is a real time video it's

07:20

Speaker A

not only water flowing upwards on both sides forming a connection no if I start now to pull this speaker away slowly you can see that the connection remains and you have a stable floating cylinder made of pure water the actual size of the thing is

07:43

Speaker A

about 3 mm here in diameter and at the end of this video you will have a cylinder that is about 2.5 cm in length moreover you see that this is not a rigid phenomenon you can see that it's

07:57

Speaker A

moving all the time you have oscillation in there the OS oscillations are coupled with the movement of the surface in on the two beakers and moreover if you watch closely you can see that this level is going down while the level of

08:10

Speaker A

this Beaker is going up so at least from this very simple observation you know so many very many things for example also that water is being transported at least in one direction from one Beaker to the other and this all happens through a

08:26

Speaker A

flee free floating cylinder of pure water there are now very many parameters with which you can play in order to further understand the phenomenon one of these is for example you could take a very small bridge and then slowly turn up the

08:43

Speaker A

voltage and see what happens if you do that you find out that if you turn up the voltage naturally you're also increasing the current and the whole phenomenon becomes much more well established much thicker much more prominent but also much more unstable

09:00

Speaker A

you can see that already with a 2 mm Bridge here that with this is 2 mm in length but about 1.5 CMS in diameter that it's doesn't look as stable and nice as the bridge that we had before

09:13

Speaker A

and the problem is for example if you would take a 5 mm Bridge it would not work at all I told you uh that with the current the if we increase the voltage the current increases as well however

09:27

Speaker A

the behavior is slightly non so you see that this is not a straight line but a curve but this is only natural because the Water Bridge also gained in diameter which means that the resistivity got lower when we increased

09:42

Speaker A

the voltage if we took a 5 mm Bridge what you can see then is first it becomes thicker and thicker and more prominent and it everything looks nice and stable but at a certain point the phenomenon is not stable anymore

09:59

Speaker A

and what you get is that suddenly the bridge is too heavy OB obviously for the electric field and the water runs out like you would normally expect from such a phenomenon to happen this means that you have a very precise window of

10:14

Speaker A

current and voltage which you are going to use if you want this phenomenon to be stable another movie that I'm going to show you now is I included that because I thought especially you might be interested in if this phenomenon on is

10:30

Speaker A

dependent dependent on the atmosphere because there are some renowned scientists telling me were telling me that this has something to do actually with cell biology so it has something to do perhaps with life itself the question is what would happen if you would try

10:47

Speaker A

this Water Bridge let's say in the helium atmosphere or in the nitrogen atmosphere or on some other planet with other atmospheres well if you do that the result is very surprising at least it was to us in an helium atmosphere it

11:00

Speaker A

does not work at all instead of a water Bridge you're getting a plasma bridge in an argon atmosphere you see that the Water Bridge is very short there has a reason because if it would if you were to make it longer then it

11:15

Speaker A

would look like that whereas oxygen and nitrogen the main components of our atmosphere seem to work quite nicely with this phenomenon you might have noticed that one major component of our atmosphere was missing in this video this is carbon dioxide and in this video

11:32

Speaker A

you see what happens if we slowly increase the carbon dioxide content of the surrounding atmosphere of the bridge and you see that with increasing carbon dioxide the bridge is Getting Thinner and thinner and by the way also very hot

11:46

Speaker A

you will see some vapor and after some time it will just break and it will not be possible anymore to restart it and we were thinking what what could be the reason for this first of all what could be the

12:02

Speaker A

reason for the fact that CO2 destabilizes the bridge so much and we were thinking that this reminded us of one thing I told you this bridge only works with chemically pure water if you add some salt for example what you get

12:16

Speaker A

is exactly a picture or a movie exactly like the one I showed you so we were thinking perhaps this has to do with the conductivity of the water so it could be a breakup due to increase of conductivity and this is exactly what

12:29

Speaker A

happens you see before CO2 addition we have 1.2 micro cement per cm and afterwards we have about 10 times as high a conductivity so the CO2 gets dissolved very rapidly into the water increases the conductivity and this is why

12:47

Speaker A

actually the whole phenomenon is then distorted and the bridge breaks up by the way we are using Platinum electrodes because if you were to use for example silver or iron electrodes you would also get a very slow destabilization of the phenomenon and

13:03

Speaker A

that is because ions would be dissolved from the electrodes into the water electrolysis would happen and with increased conductivity the uh phenomenon would become unstable however this is not the case if you take Platinum electrodes another thing that you can

13:19

Speaker A

play with next to current and voltage and the atmospheres is the geometry of the beakers for example you can also uh take cuboid peers cuetes and if you do that you see the bridge is here very small also very unstable if you pull the

13:37

Speaker A

peers apart it's likely to break but apart from that the basic features are there you have a water reconnection you have water flowing upwards and you also have some sort of mass transport now the question is why should we use such a

13:50

Speaker A

geometry which would decrease the stability of the whole phenomenon well it has a big Advantage because with Cub beers you can use a very powerful very old but very powerful visualization technique which is called schen visualization with such a

14:08

Speaker A

setup if you have no changes in the refractive index of the objects you're interested in then it looks just like if the way it looks if you watch it with the naked eye however if something would change the refractive

14:22

Speaker A

index then suddenly these bunch of light beams which is here parallel is not parallel anymore and the second lens here cannot focus it into the small hole so it doesn't reach the camera meaning that wherever the refractive index is

14:37

Speaker A

changed you get the black spot on your video and if you do this technique apply this to the Waterbridge setup with the cuboid beers you see that there's a lot going on in there you see actually here the movement of the water where which

14:53

Speaker A

has a different refractive index now I was putting a diffuser into the setup to show you this this is how the setup would look like to the naked eye if you just watch it and as I remove it again

15:04

Speaker A

you can see how powerful this Sher technique is you can see the SCH moving showing you the actual way of the water transport and you can see this water is transported here from the electrodes going up across the bridge to the other

15:17

Speaker A

electrod here going down again and back so what we have is some sort of a lying eight profile of water transport now that is strange because what you basically have here is water you have two electrodes you apply voltage and

15:34

Speaker A

current what you would expect is gas formation and electrolysis and no water transport what you get is water transport water with some sort of different refractive index but we you get no electrolysis at all even if you leave that running for many

15:52

Speaker A

hours they will be no gas formation so the question is what is carrying our charge here what is happening instead of normal electrolysis the first thing that would be interesting is why does the water change the refractive index the most

16:08

Speaker A

basic explanation would be because it changes its temperature this is why we looked at the whole setup with a theography camera and this is actually what is happening in this video color represents temperature and you can see that the center of the

16:23

Speaker A

bridge is much hotter than the rest it's about 50° C whereas the water inside of the speakers has about 25° C moreover from this video you can see that water is obviously constantly being transported not only in one but in two

16:41

Speaker A

directions so we know now that there is mass transport of hot water and this mass transport can easily be measured by just putting two balances below the beers connect them to computer and see how much mass is actually being

16:54

Speaker A

transferred and if you do that you see that this is not a minor effect but it's huge after like 200 seconds about 10 G of mass is transported from the anode to the cathode Beaker and once that has

17:08

Speaker A

been established there's some sort of back flow but it will stay here for many hours actually in some sort of metastable equilibrium sometimes and we don't know why that is it starts the other way around that you have transport

17:23

Speaker A

from cathode to anode Beaker but after uh after some time it always ends up the other way around what we can also get from this figure are two numbers for example some sort of Maximum Mass transfer and some sort of average mass

17:40

Speaker A

transfer but we have to keep in mind that whatever numbers we get here the back flow if you say that always flowing into both directions the back flow is actually always kept low or disregarded at all so much for the mass transport

17:57

Speaker A

the question is we obviously also have a charge transport involved and when you think of charge transport in water you think of H+ and O minus because these are the natural charges in water a method to visualize them would be to

18:12

Speaker A

take a pH meter and just measure the pH however because the conductivity of the water that we have is so low a conventional pH meter does not work so what we did is we added some pH D however these pH D themselves are

18:28

Speaker A

increasing the activity of the system so they're changing the actual phenomenon uh fortunately they did not stay destabilize it so much that it could not work didn't work anymore but as you can see in this video here this

18:43

Speaker A

is again a SCH SCH setup with a pH die you can see our SCH with the hot water here and here you can also see them moving here and there but you see in addition to that a basic and acidic area

18:59

Speaker A

is being formed but they do not necessarily coincide with the SCH with the with the hot water that is moving well what does that mean it means that once we add the pH die we are encouraging conventional electrochemistry to take place because

19:18

Speaker A

then we have H+ and O minus but these are not necessarily at the same side where we have the hot water and we are thinking at least until now that the hot water is somehow transport in the charge

19:30

Speaker A

so we have plus positive and negative charges in there but once we add the pH die we also have by the way gas formation so we just have a conventional electrolysis cell and it does not necessarily tell us anything about the

19:44

Speaker A

charges that are being transported except for the fact it might not be H+ and O minus it's even more prominent if you make a comparison here you have for example a water Bridge already in place with pH die you see that the acid that's

20:02

Speaker A

being formed is still at the electrode as is the base whereas the charge carriers going through the bridge supposed to be already here and if you take out the electrodes after half an hour then you see that you really have a

20:14

Speaker A

basic and an acidic solution however if you make a bridge setup without the pH die leave it running for the same time and at the pH die afterwards you see that the pH change is much less pronounced meaning that the addition of

20:30

Speaker A

the pH die actually changes the system very much and whatever charge transfer was happening here might not be H+ or o minus in the conventional sense so some first conclusions which we can draw from this very simple experiments we have a

20:46

Speaker A

flow rate we have a current we think we have mainly positive charge carriers and we think that in our case charge and mass transfer are related from that it is straightforward that with each Elementary charge a mass of 1.3 to 9.6 \*

21:02

Speaker A

10 ^- 14 G is being transported now that is not a nice figure a much nicer figure is that it was this would correspond to a sphere with a diameter of 30 to 60 nanometers but I don't say that this is

21:17

Speaker A

actually what's happening and don't tell you that we have 30 or 60 nanm water spheres going in there this is just the amount of water that is being transported with one charge and that's obviously much more than just one or two

21:30

Speaker A

molecules there are however many questions open now first of all we were just looking until now uh at the complete setup we never take took a closer look at the bridge itself and I will give you two hypothesis actually that were uh

21:48

Speaker A

postulated by very noun professors for example Professor Del chuder thinks that there are coherent domains of water molecules inside of the bridge and these transporting the charge coherent means here in a sense that all the oscillations of these molecules are in

22:05

Speaker A

Phase they become Quantum mechanically entangled and a property of these coherent domains is that they can release electrons thereby becoming positively charged and these are huge domains of water molecules which are then transported along your electric field this

22:25

Speaker A

is difficult for me to to grasp actually and it's also very difficult to measure in addition Professor aselin Jacob from Israel had another idea he uh thinks that actually there are there is a network of nanobubbles in there which

22:42

Speaker A

are charged and this network drags the water molecules with them across the bridge and this is responsible for the phenomenon for practical reasons I will now concentrate on the second hypothesis because nanobubbles are something that you can measure whereas with coherent

22:58

Speaker A

domains this is rather difficult so what would nanobubbles do if we had nanobubbles in there because they are bubbles they are filled with either vacuum or some gas or water vapor so they would have a much much lower

23:14

Speaker A

density than the rest of the Water Bridge in order to look for density changes we took another Optical technique which is called contouring you take a diffusing screen with a grd a light source behind and you watch watch

23:29

Speaker A

then with a high-speed camera again on the projection of your grid inside of the phenomenon inside of the Water Bridge if you do that here again with a high-speed movie what you can see is very interesting you see that what you

23:44

Speaker A

saw with your naked eye that this is a vivid phenomenon where lots of Dynamics is going on is actually true because the projection of this stripe here is not a still picture inside of the Water Bridge but you see that it's moving that there

23:59

Speaker A

are that this image is actually moving forward and backward inside of the Water Bridge with a in a very high speed actually up to 30 m per second so what actual information can we get out of this if we're imagining

24:16

Speaker A

that our Water Bridge would closely resemble let's say just a cylindric lens we were simulating that by just putting a sapphire Rod here which is a cylindric lens well if that were the case then nothing should happen to the grid

24:32

Speaker A

because the cylindric lens really doesn't change anything if you have a vertical grid if we were to take a converging lens the grid width would be broadened and if we were to take a dispersing lens instead of the Water

24:46

Speaker A

Bridge we would narrow the grid width now the overall shape of the Water Bridge is slightly concave so it's acts as a dispersing lens and this is why the grid width here and here is narrowed a little bit

24:59

Speaker A

however as you saw from the movie before there are structures acting like converging lenses which move through the bridge and this has been published in 2007 and in a more precise way in a better way in 2009 in a very recent

25:16

Speaker A

paper the question is what structures can act like converging lenses it could either be a geometry TR change of the bridge surface waves but we didn't observe any of those so what we think what's actually happening is that we have gradients of

25:34

Speaker A

the refractive index moving through the bridge and these gradients can most likely be caused by gradients in density and you can verify this hypothesis with another very simple experiment you take a light source a diffusing screen with a blue and a red

25:53

Speaker A

filter and if you really have your Bridge there and there are things in there that act like converging lenses well they should do with the light what the converging lens does they should Flex the light path so that you could see actually blue spots

26:08

Speaker A

in front of the red screen and red spots in front of the blue screen because this is exactly what a converging lens would do now if you look at a video this is a simple video taking exactly this

26:20

Speaker A

experimental setup you see that this is what is happening you see red spots appearing here and you see blue spots appearing here so we have density gradients moving through the Water Bridge and these density gradients we measure the focal length of these uh of

26:36

Speaker A

these so-called lenses and there's a density gradients up to 7% density change now you cannot get 7% density change of water just by heating it or by pressurizing it it's impossible the only thing where you can very easily get 7% density changes if

26:54

Speaker A

you introduce a second phase like a gaseous phase because the density is much much lower you just need a few perent of a gaseous phase for example nanobubbles in order to get this change now we know that there is

27:08

Speaker A

something moving inside of the bridge which could be nanobubbles but we don't know how the actual water flows how the water flows through the through the bridge we saw that it flows in both directions but we don't know does it

27:20

Speaker A

just flow along each other or in order to find out that we added Tracer particles and again looked at the Phenomenon with a high-speed camera and if you do that you can see some remarkable features of the bridge first

27:36

Speaker A

of all regardless of how thoroughly you shake your Tracer particles how well they are dispersed in your solution they will never ever enter the bridge they always stick on the outer layer so they are somehow excluded from this water

27:53

Speaker A

here inside of the bridge and secondly they're not just flowing along know they are spiraling around the bridge and we measure the velocities they are spiraling with some uh 10 cm per second and they're spiraling either that way or

28:09

Speaker A

that way so the water in the outer layer of the bridge somehow spirals around in both directions uh it is very difficult you saw that with a pH die to get a stable bridge if you add something that would

28:25

Speaker A

for example color it one example where this works is Romine B if you add Romine B to the anodic side of the beaker and you see just very simple setup just pushing the peer away you can see that

28:41

Speaker A

the zamine B is transported through the bridge and flows very nicely into the other Beaker and if you look closely it looks like as if it's being transported in the middle of the bridge and not in the outside because you have

28:58

Speaker A

a bright Zone here and a bright Zone here just next to the dark Zone it's actually it's difficult to see but it looks as if the uh Romine B is transported in the middle if you add the Romine B to the cathodic speaker

29:12

Speaker A

something very strange appears you see that first of all the bridge looks more unstable and it looks as if the radom P wants to go in the into the other direction but it really has troubles doing that and it is pushed back all the

29:28

Speaker A

time so for some reason the transport from anode to cathode if you add this die works much better than the transport from cath from anode to cathode and if you were to add ROM and P to both beers

29:44

Speaker A

and add some Tracer particles then you can again see the Tracer particles circling around the bridge this is real time now this is why they are so fast and you can also see here in the middle it's slightly reddish and you can might

29:59

Speaker A

also see that here and here it looks as if this D is also not part of this outer layer of the bridge as if it is somehow excluded so as if the particles are excluded into the outside excluded and

30:10

Speaker A

the dye is excluded into the inside of the bridge so there's obviously something strange going on with this outer layer of the bridge you can actually separate it with a Charged glass rod if you take a glass rod and just rub it on your

30:24

Speaker A

clothes so that it's electrostatically charged and you bring it close to the Water Bridge what happens is that you detach the outer layer physically after which the inner core in the laminina flow curls up around the glass rod due

30:40

Speaker A

to the quander effect but first the first thing that happens is that you have a jet that's ejected perpendicular to the rest of the bridge you can see that also here in in this picture you have a jet where this outer layer of the

30:55

Speaker A

Water Bridge which is about 10 to 20% of its whole diameter is being detached before the rest of the bridge curls up around the uh glass rod when we were doing optical experiments we also were experimenting with polarized light and

31:14

Speaker A

basic uh polar polarizing analysis you can make is you just take two polarizing filters have your object in between and if they are parallel to each other naturally you see the object almost unchain changed what we also did is we

31:30

Speaker A

painted our peas Black so that we had no influence from the glass this is why you have two black spouts and your water bridge in between if you turn now the second polarizer the analyzer by 90° what you would expect this a black

31:46

Speaker A

picture because no light can go through if the polarizing angle is exactly 90° to the incident light except something in between changes the polarization angle of the light what we actually see is that we have some bright spots here on the spouts of

32:03

Speaker A

the beers that's only natural because reflected light changes the polarization angle once it's reflected that's okay and our bridge is almost black these bright spots here could be explained by light conduction from some other part so we don't think that this is really

32:20

Speaker A

relevant however if you know keep the 90° relation between the two polarizers but turn them by 45 degrees with respect to the Bridge's main axis what you then see and this is interesting is that suddenly the upper and the lower part of

32:36

Speaker A

the bridge become bright and because this is a cylindrical geometry it's not the upper and the lower part it is the outer layer that somehow changes the polarization angle of the light and we were thinking now what could be the

32:50

Speaker A

cause for this so we were imitating the Water Bridge with a glass tube and we were fill this glass tube with water and and then we were looking at the diagonal setup and the right angle setup and you

33:02

Speaker A

can see at the under the diagonal setup you can see the glass tube as you could see actually the V bridge because whenever a glass tube is formed you have stress POF ringent you have a preferred orientation of the glass molecules and

33:16

Speaker A

this is a p refringent material so P refringence could be one explanation then we thought perhaps it's scattering so we filled the glass tub with milk if you do that you see that there as it the the milk becomes bright but it becomes

33:31

Speaker A

bright in both setups so scattering cannot be the case otherwise we would have seen a bright Zone both in the diagonal polarizer setup and the right angle polarizer setup and then we filled our glass tube with sparkling water and

33:45

Speaker A

what we saw there was very interesting because let me enlarge that for you because it's hard to see here if you do that you can see that under the diagonal polar setup you have also a bright Zone in

34:01

Speaker A

between here so the water somehow changes the polarization angle of the light however it's not the water it's micro bubbles where which reflect the light under the Bruiser angles so an explanation could be that we have either here and here micro bubbles bubbles in

34:21

Speaker A

size of one micron or bigger which reflect the light under the broster angle thereby changing the polarization angle or or it could be P ringent actually uh a zone of P refringent Water excluding particles just as our Bridgewater does and solutes just as our

34:41

Speaker A

Bridgewater does was recently discovered by Professor Jerry Pollock from the University of Washington in Seattle and has now been reaffirmed by more than 10 different uh research groups all over the world I just heard that at a water

34:56

Speaker A

conference in Vermont and it could be Professor poock thinks that that this water actually is very similar to this exclusion Zone water which can be found close to hydrophilic surfaces or close to gel surfaces which doesn't really bring us

35:14

Speaker A

closer to an explanation because this exclusions on water is also not very well understood it could also be that we have some uh microscopic bubbles in there then we would we would understand why this uh phenomenon this change of

35:28

Speaker A

polarization angle happens now we know something about the outer layer of the bridge let's take a look inside we did that with inelastic Uvis scattering at the synchrotron facility in triest in Italy we took a UV laser uh sent it

35:44

Speaker A

through the bridge and when if you do that then you get it's like in Raman or Bri scattering an elastic scattering line and in elastic scattering lines and we entered the bridge here right below the middle and we were measuring in

35:59

Speaker A

backwards scattering mode so our detector was sitting here and what we got was basically a CCD picture so we had the elastic scattering line we had the Stokes and the anti-stokes line but from this picture you can get very nice

36:15

Speaker A

information for example if you look precisely then you see that the Stokes and antistokes lines are slightly inclined and inclination means that we have some sort sort of gradient and in this case it is a gradient of sound

36:33

Speaker A

velocity meaning that the sound velocity in the outer layer is normal whereas the sound velocity in the inner part of the bridge well can either be explained by a temperature decrease a density decrease or both if it were just a temperature decrease we

36:50

Speaker A

would have 0° celsus ice in the center of the Water Bridge now this is very unlikely since we know that the outer lay has about 50° C but actually just from this measurement we can't say anymore but we

37:06

Speaker A

have more information in this picture you can also see that the uh thickness of these lines diminishes from this you get another gradient and this is the gradient in kinematic viscosity and the kinematic viscosity gradient can be explained by either a

37:24

Speaker A

temperature increase or a density decrease now we would have a contradiction here if this would have something to do with temperature because the same measurement tells you the temperature increases and it decreases or we leave out temperature at all and

37:39

Speaker A

say it's just a density decrease because this density decrease would explain both observations and the density decrease is exactly what we are looking for if we're looking for nanobubbles so what we think that we have as a preliminary model

37:58

Speaker A

we have no nanobubbles on the outside and 2 to S volume per nanobubbles in the inside of the Water Bridge we could have Micro bubbles on the outside creating this polarizing effect we could also have coherent domains or exclusion Zone water perhaps

38:17

Speaker A

that is is the same we don't know these days if that is true on the outside and then we would have no micro bubbles there um another possibility I didn't tell you about if we observe a density decrease

38:34

Speaker A

it doesn't necessarily mean that we have some sort of bubbles in there it could mean that the actual structure of the water changes so in order to see if that is happening we did some nutron scattering uh which gives us some information about

38:50

Speaker A

the local density around each water molecule we did this with Professor Téa in France at the reor or and although in this first measurement we only could evaluate a very short region because the rest was partly absorbed by the

39:05

Speaker A

beaker we got some very interesting result the first structural beak of d2o we used d2o here instead of H2 because H2 has a huge uh inelastic scattering and it's very difficult to measure it but let's assume d2o heavy V is the same

39:22

Speaker A

as H2O the first structural Peak coincides with that of bul d2o this first structural Peak tells us something about the geometry and the inter molecular distances around each water molecule in essence it's telling us that the micro density is the same as in bulk

39:40

Speaker A

water now we have an overall density that is different but we have the same micro density another hint that we might have a second phase a bubble phase moreover what in first glance looked to us as if it was just some sort of noise

39:56

Speaker A

here at very low que we have an additional feature and it's very difficult to interpret what it is especially from this measurement where you have this very bad signal to noise ratio but a possible explanation is a second phase a gaseous phase objects in

40:12

Speaker A

the nanometer size range which could again be the bubbles uh this summer I had the possibility to make better Neutron cing measurements at Sandals uh Isis instrument in Oxford and these were better in a sense because we had a large Q range accessible although

40:32

Speaker A

the actual physical angle range was the same as we had in France because this was a white Beam at the time of flight instrument we could calculate the whole uh defraction Spectrum from the uh defraction we got there and the first

40:47

Speaker A

moment when we saw what we what the result we had we were very excited we measured null water which is a mixture of d2o and H2O where you just see the oygen oxygen relations because theum and hydrogen are canceling each other out we

41:02

Speaker A

were measuring d2o and H2O and especially from H2O you see wow this looks different than bulk water and we were thinking okay there might be a different structure here and this would be great because liquid water with a

41:17

Speaker A

different fracture than bulk water this is something fundamental so we were calculating the G of R functions and found out yeah they are well they also different but then we did something this is very it was very important we took some bulk water data

41:32

Speaker A

with the same data quality as this is with the same signal to noise ratio and we also calculated the G of our functions and they were also very different from bulk water so although we had a week of measurement time very

41:46

Speaker A

stable breaches 8 hours measurement every day or 10 hours with this signal to noise ratio it's very difficult to say that we have have anything else but bulk water in there although it looks different one thing that we can say is

42:04

Speaker A

that these high Q oscillations here in both cases don't seem to Decay as rapidly with increasing Q as the bulk water oscillations well that means there's possibly some H bond breaking and the O bond is better defined like it

42:18

Speaker A

is in the free molecule but this is also very cautious interpretation of the data the actually if you we looking very very uh if you're looking with the eye of the uh experimentalist and data analyst at this and you're looking at

42:35

Speaker A

the data signal to noise ratio we have bulk water inside of the Water Bridge so to summarize what we know so far what we have is first of all it forms like a cone jet in electr spray so

42:50

Speaker A

the formation I think is very well understood and can be calculated however the stabilization afterward is not so well understood we have charges and mass transported in both directions with a preparation from plus to minus we have different layers with

43:07

Speaker A

different properties we have density gradients moving through the bridge we have a correlation between the density gradients and the Tracer particles I didn't show you that but you can uh there's an experiment where you can prove that we think we have the same

43:21

Speaker A

micro density as bulk water from the neutrons cing we know that there is a low Q feature which indicates the presence of nanobubbles we think that the local order is retained we have indications of partly HB breaking in elastic uis scattering

43:37

Speaker A

indicates that we have some nanobubbles in the center uh yes these outer layers show similarities to the exclusion Zone water of Professor Pollock probably and this is what we what we think at at the moment the bridge consists of a dynamic network of

43:53

Speaker A

charged nanobubbles created by electroc citation so the high electric field rips up the the water Network creating nanobubbles these are charged and we think that these bubbles are then dragging the surrounding water with them and this is how the charge and mass

44:09

Speaker A

transport actually happens however it could also be that coherent domains as suggested by Professor Del Jud and V yellow are formed and if they form they would exclude all solutes and all dissolved gases and therefore they could also

44:25

Speaker A

create the N bubbles so if we don't know if they're there but if they're there they could be existing in addition to the Nano bubbles inside of the Water Bridge at this point I have to State something very obvious there are very

44:39

Speaker A

many people nowadays involved in this research most important my mentor and Professor from the Technical University of Gratz Professor Jacob voich Leger without him there would be no water P research at all most of the videos you saw most of the optical investigations

44:56

Speaker A

were done by him um then of course Professor Téa who introduced me to the world of neutron scattering with professor soer and Professor nor Professor Beni wenga with whom I did the uh in lastic yubis cing of course my former colleagues from the

45:13

Speaker A

uh Gratz University of Technology my diploma student who just started to work on the Water Bridge month ago and of course my colleagues at the wetus Excellence Center for water which helped me and made it possible for me to

45:29

Speaker A

continue this research and naturally last but not least I want to thank you very much for your [Applause] attention do we have any questions uh elar when you talk about bubbles yeah you bring in mind of course a like you

45:57

Speaker A

said a gas fill or vacuum filed or uh and with a very very strong contrast intensity between the surrounding medium in that case you should see me scattering if you have a UV uh that depends on the size not maybe better to

46:11

Speaker A

talk about like domains domains with different water structures that would move around and be a dynamic system if we really had different water structures we think we should see some hint in the nutrients scattering now you're right we

46:28

Speaker A

do see something but then again from this data we cannot interpret we can make any different interpretation Q values you have to yeah and that is difficult of course the point is in order to increase the signal to noise

46:43

Speaker A

Rao we would have to measure at least 10 times longer which would mean 10 weeks uh full measurement time and this is impossible to get 10 weeks beam time at any Newton scattering facility so we are afraid with the data we have we cannot

46:58

Speaker A

make any further conclusions but you're right it could be that there is some water with a different structure in there but we cannot prove that um are there any uh practical applications that uh you see for the floating water Bridge outside of just a

47:20

Speaker A

scientific interest about that indirectly at the Water conference in Vermont very many people were presenting properties of water which obviously are not understood yet or could not be simulated so far first of all there's this exclusion Zone water

47:42

Speaker A

which has properties perhaps similar to that of the outer layer then there are the there's this Quantum entangled water predict calculated and predicted by professor dudich and there are also other sorts of new water properties which uh people

48:00

Speaker A

don't really understand but investigate or predict nowadays now what I was told is that probably the floating water bridge is one of the best uh tools to investigate this new water because whatever is in there is obviously also

48:17

Speaker A

not well understood it's different from the normal water that we are used to deal with so it might hold the key to explain one or more of these phenomena one once we understand that then we have a shift in the uh in the in the

48:32

Speaker A

fundamentals of understanding of water and then lots of applications will come so I would rather see it as a tool of to to investigate a hitherto unknown property or unknown behavior of water early on you mentioned that the

48:51

Speaker A

bridge got hot yeah what increase in temperature can it tolerate before it gets disrupted um that is interesting we were thinking cooling down might stabilize it so we added some ice cubes and then the bridge destabilized and vanished and we used boiling water and

49:12

Speaker A

got a wonderful Bridge which did not destabilize at all so you can boil it and it's still there you it's impossible to destroy it by increasing the temperature other than to vaporize the water but it doesn't not destabilize

49:27

Speaker A

with increasing temperature so the conve the convection going on in the boiling water doesn't transf either that uh you can have boiling Bridges by the way we if you increase the current and the voltage high enough then you have a temperatures

49:43

Speaker A

close to the boiling point of water in the Water Bridge and you have got lots of vapor U coming from the bridge Without Really destabilizing it if temperature is not making a difference is pressure have you tried pressure we haven't okay we just use

50:06

Speaker A

different gases but we never try it in a diff lower or higher pressures and when you introduce the glass rod next to it um it seems like you might be able to uh change things like the the charge on the grass bass

50:23

Speaker A

Rod perhaps set up an electric field across the bridge as well I gu these are future things you could potentially do could you see any uh predictions that what might happen when you change change the uh charge in the rod if you use a

50:40

Speaker A

glass rod that is completely uncharged then you can touch the bridge and play around with it I don't have a video here but this is really quite nice you can touch it it doesn't break you can move through the bridge with the glass rod

50:50

Speaker A

the water flows above and below if you rub it and it's highly charged then due to the uh High concentration of field lines the water is direct towards the bridge and then it disrupts because it tries to flow around

51:04

Speaker A

and as as we saw that I don't know if that answers your question any difference in the material of the beakers yes um we tried hydrophobic and hydrophilic beers with hydrophobic beakers like Teflon it's much more difficult to get the water

51:29

Speaker A

bridge and the uh the geometry of the water flowing up also looks different but it is possible to get it with both hydrophobic and hydrophilic materials conducting materials like metal we never tried but this we didn't do that for

51:44

Speaker A

obvious reasons because we are pretty sure you get the discharge between the beers before anything else okay there uh no further questions so we have a set Institute pin uh to give you to commemorate your uh tour thank

52:02

Speaker A

you very much thanks very much if you'll join me in thanking Yom for his tour thank you [Music]

Topics: floating water bridge electrohydrodynamics pure water electrospray neutron scattering UV scattering nanobubbles water structure SETI Institute Elmar Fuchs

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