when they were chic and groovy.:
There is one in my oldest son's room. It's a classic. Hmmm, they should still work with LED bulbs, right?
Actually, no. The motion is caused by the heating at the bottom and cooling at the top. An LED lamp will not produce the heat required to drive the thermal exchange.
You are one guy I would like to stare at a lava lamp with.
Ok, there seems to be a bit of interest, so here's a paragraph of tech talk.
If one knows how an old thermostat with a bi-metal spring works you know how a lava lamp works. The two different materials have different temperature coefficient of expansion.
In a lava lamp the plasticly looking stuff that rises and falls expands and contracts faster than the liquidy looking stuff.
The lamp at the bottom heats the "lava" until part of it expands enough to break free, like a hot air balloon. The decorative metal cap on top acts as a little radiator to cool the "lava" floating on top until a dollop of it breaks free and falls.
It's a heat engine of sorts, but it's "useful purpose" is to provide enlightenment as the girl above attests.
Your one of those peoples that ruins Santa Clause too...
Lava lamps run on magic. Its the energy of wizards that gets trapped in the glass. Plain and simple.
Rules of thermodynamics doesn't apply to those in my van.
You didn't have a dark side of the moon album to sort things out with?Maybe not, but in all the vans I ever road in the rules of chemical combustion applied if the seeds popped. Every shirt I owned in the early '70s had pin holes burned in them.
Santa Clause is really an Alien. Batboy wrote about it.
You didn't have a dark side of the moon album to sort things out with?
My love of lava lamps could explain my affinity for pickled eggs.
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Best I had were at Eda's Railroad Bar in Milwaukee, WI. Place only closed for three hours between 0300 and 0600.