Bottom blobs

Fig. 7. Experiments and computations on the advection of a dye blob in an eccentric cylinder apparatus (from Niederkorn and Ottino, 1993). Left Top, experiment using Newtonian fluid bottom, numerical simulation ... 

Well, there is a way to guarantee that to adopt the view that the structure of reality is infinitely fine-grained the bottom divisions are everywhere, so the upper divisions are bound to meet them. As it was pointed out in 2.2., this view is equivalent to blob realism, the position that unifies the problems of metaphysical realism with that of internal realism. 

Figure 1.14. The very petri dish that sparked the discovery of penicillin. The white blob at the bottom is a colony of Penicillium notatum contaminating a plate streaked with Staphylococcus aureus (small, circular colonies). The penicillin diffusing from the fungus radially into the agar has killed off the bacterial colonies in its vicinity.

Adjust your safety glasses comfortably over your eyes, and then add a tablespoon (15 milliliters) of baking soda to a half cup of water (120 milliliters) and stir. Allow the undissolved material to settle to the bottom (this should take about a minute), and then carefully pour off the clear liquid into another glass, leaving the solids. Pour a tablespoon (15 milliliters) of the copper sulfate solution described in the Shopping List and Solutions into the decanted baking soda solution. Beautiful blue flakes should immediately form and settle out of solution. You should also see some bubbles, and the supernatant, the liquid over the blue blob precipitate, should be a pastel blue. The bubbles are from excess acid in the copper solution reacting with the bicarbonate ion. 

Experiment 1.2 Lava lamp. When the lamp is turned on, blobs of heated wax ascend slowly from the bottom to the top where they cool and then descend to the bottom again, causing a constant movement of both phases. 

The fate of a hazardous waste substance in water is a function of the substance s solubility, density, biodegradability, and chemical reactivity. Dense, water-immiscible liquids may simply sink to the bottoms of bodies of water or aquifers and accumulate there as blobs of liquid. This has happened, for example, with hundreds of tons of PCB wastes that have accumulated in sediments in the Hudson River in New York State noted in Section 15.9. Biodegradable substances are broken down... 

Fignre 15.6 shows some of the pertinent aspects of hazardous waste materials in bodies of water, with emphasis on the strong role played by sediments. An interesting kind of hazardous waste material that may accumulate in sediments consists of dense, water-immiscible liquids that can sink to the bottoms of bodies of water or aquifers and remain there as blobs of liquid as was the case with the PCB wastes dumped into the Fludson River, noted in Section 15.9. 

Figure 5 Zero-concentration form factors of star polymers with different functionalities. Data obtained in a good solvent, methylcyclohexane-di4 with SANS. From bottom to top /= 8 (polyisoprene),/=18 (polyisoprene),/= 32 (polybutadiene),/= 64 (polybutadiene), and/= 128 (polybutadiene). The data are offset vertically for clarity. The solid line represents Eq. (27). Arrows indicate Q=the onset of the asymptotic regime in which scattering is caused by the swollen blobs in the corona. (From Ref 31.)...

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