No offense taken. What is impossible today might not be tomorrow. I still think I can get it to work.

Quote from: r0ck3t3r on March 17, 2008, 08:48:34 AM
No offense taken. What is impossible today might not be tomorrow. I still think I can get it to work.

*rolls eyes*
I admire your willingness to go against "accepted wisdom", but if you insist that your idea will work, please explain how to overcome the pressure at the bottom of the flotation chamber that is encountered when the balls are introduced.

**Do you understand how buoyancy works?

Here's a thought experiment:  take a buoyant object, say a water-polo ball, and dive with it to the bottom of a pool.  Can you imagine how hard that would be?  The amount of energy it would take to push the ball to the bottom is at best equal to the amount of energy you could recover by letting the ball float to the top, and in reality will be much more.  Taking the "short-cut" and introducing the ball through some clever diaphragm at the bottom doesn't help, as the energy it would take to displace the water there is the same no matter how you do it, and this is greater than the gravitational potential difference of the float's mass between the top of the chamber and the bottom.

Look at it a different way.  You are at the bottom of a big tank of water (outside the tank).  If you poke a hole in the tank.  What happens?  We know that a stream of water will shoot out of the hole.  Ok, so to stop the spill, you put your finger over the hole and apply pressure.  Now, expand the hole so that it will just accommodate one of your buoyant balls.  Now you must apply more pressure to the ball to keep it from shooting out of the hole.  You will find that no matter how you do it, the energy required to get the ball through the orifice is greater than the gravitational energy gained by the ball as it floats to the top of the chamber.

I can sense your reluctance to accept the impossibility of what you propose.
In the absence of a well-articulated theoretical argument which reverses the foundations of standard fluid dynamics, the only way you could demonstrate the viability of your idea would be to build a working model.

the tank could be split into levels. Each with only a ball sized hole allowing the ball out. This would reduce the pressure at the bottom of the tank. a slight tilt in each level could ensure that the water pressure is not directed into these holes.

You could also use a torpedo room type set up. I understand this uses a lot of energy. I still think that more could be created than used. There are only 2 points of loss. If those could be fine tuned then the whole thing would work.

Of course, if we spent on creating solar power what we spent on the war... none of this would be needed.

Oh what about using the method used for underwater hide outs during the Vietnam war. The cave water level was much lower than the outsides. Could something like that be exploited?

if the water pressure could be lessened enough for the connection part not to be flooded, and the balls were connected to each other...

then this still probally wont work but eh, here it is anyway.

It's good that you are thinking, and these are creative ideas, but you should learn more about water pressure and what makes an "air pocket" possible.  You may also find the hydrostatic paradox interesting:

http://scubageek.com/articles/wwwparad.html