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Re: Down the Plughole
And funnily enough, UCL, one of the world's leading Universities, think it's a myth as well....
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maths/research/fluids-gateway/faq
Quote:
Is it true that water goes down the plughole with the opposite spin in the Southern Hemisphere?
No, well maybe, but it has nothing to do with which hemisphere you are in.
It is true that because the Earth is rotating, the Coriolis force has an effect on the motion of water, and this effect is reversed between the northern and southern hemispheres. However, the importance of this effect is measured by a number known as the Rossby number, R, which is the ratio of the average speed of the fluid and the product of the rate of rotation of the Earth (at a particular latitude) and the length scale of the motion. Flows with small Rossby numbers are strongly affected by the rotation of the Earth, while those with large Rossby numbers are not. If we consider a sink that is 30cm wide in London and assume that the water flows at approximately 10cm/s, then the Rossby number of the flow would be close to 10000. Basically, this has no bearing on the direction of the flow. The biggest effect you’ll see comes from the initial direction of the flow and the symmetry of the basin, which could very well be different depending where you are in the world.
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