Below 2.7 Kelvin IIRC, liquid helium starts behaving as a “superfluid”; it flows without measurable friction. And it exhibits many strange behaviors, such as it will “climb” out of an open suspended container. I had an off the wall idea about this. Could it be that superfluid helium isn’t flowing in the classical sense? That the quantum wave function describing the helium is collapsing in a new location- that is, “teleporting”? This would certainly explain why there is no friction. And it would also explain the climbing out of the container thingy: it would be a macroscopic demonstration of quantum tunnelling, with the superfluid helium “tunnelling” to a lower (in this case literally) energy state.
Is this a possibility?
Good question. IIRC, Richard Feynman wrote a couple of “guesswork” equations which sort of explained some of the things that happened with liquid helium and wound up winning the Nobel Prize for it.
I dunno?
I always presumed it to be some phenom like the wick effect.
Seems to me that its acting more like a gas than anything.
While the ability of liquid helium to climb out of a jar possibly appears to be the weirdest behaviour it has, it’s actually one of the duller properties of the stuff.
It’s just a particularly noticable consequence of Van der Waals attraction. In any fluid in a container, there’s a slight attaction between the atoms in the liquid and the walls of the jar. You can see this “stickyness” if you look closely at where water meets the side of a glass: the water curves slightly up the walls. This force is drawing the water up the sides.
Now in a normal liquid there’s a limit to how far up the sides the fluid can get and that’s set by temperature differences. For instance, if the wall is warmer than the liquid, there’s a lot of evaporation just where it meets the wall. Water is being drawn up, only to evaporate before it can get very far.
A superfluid however has weird thermal properties that mean these limiting processes don’t apply. Hence the Van der Waals forces can drag it all the way up the wall and over the top.
Feynman’s treatment of HeII was somewhat more profound than this - the phenomenological “guesswork” having been done earlier. He didn’t get a Nobel for this, though it commonly suggested he could have. Whether anyone nominated him for one on these grounds - rather than for his QED work - won’t be known until the Swedes release the relevant files in a few years time.
It’s been a number of years since I read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, but as I recall he stated that it was his equations for HeII (which he described as “sort of explaining what happened”) which got him the Nobel. He knows this because he sent them to some other professor, who told him that he’d done a better job than anyone else at figuring out what the heck was going on with the stuff, and it was that professor who submitted Feynman’s name to the Nobel committee.
Of course, I’m going from nearly two decades old memory here and Feynman seemed to be a fairly humble fellow when it came to a lot of his accomplishments, so I could be wrong, or Feynman could have misstated his work (though I’d believe the former before the latter).
The citation for the 1965 Physics Nobel is pretty unambiguous:
Had anyone also nominated him for the later HeII work, the process could take that into account. But the QED stuff the citation refers to was quite sufficient in itself and had doubtless been widely nominated, so this would only be a formality.
I don’t see what’s so strange about it. The helium is behaving the way I would, saying “I gotta get outta here; it’s too damn cold.”