Surprise Discovery Reveals a Whole New Source of Evaporation

The evaporation of liquid water into steam or mist is one of the most well-studied physical processes on Earth.

12 comments

Am I stupid if I already believed this to be true and experimentally verified?

If a photon hits water it heats it up (this is not controversial)

If a photo hits a water molecule in exactly the right way can't that cause it to evaporate? We know light can excite an electron.
- It's slightly different from the light just heating the water. The energy of the individual photons colliding with the water molecules causes them to vaporize without heat transfer.
  
  Yes and this effect is very small compared to the effect of heat, but when accounted for, it can make a difference at scale, in weather and climate simulation models, for example.
Oh man, I hope this one is real. These are the real fun ones. I didn't let myself get my hopes up with the superconductor, for obvious reasons, but this ones harder. MIT generally doesn't fuck around.
- A little weird why this only got published in PNAS and not something like Science, but hopefully the results is legit. What happened with that superconductor, btw? Did not replicate?
  
  Nope. LK 99 (if I remember right...) has some interesting properties, but is not a room temp superconductor.
  
  In pure form it turned out to be an insulator
Well even if it doesn't bring about the 2nd age of steam for mankind, it should at least be inspiration for a new RP genre - the merging of lasers + evaporation = Cyber + Steampunk?
- Laserpunk?
Neat. I am surprised it took this long for someone to test this.
- Maybe the technology wasn't available?

12 comments