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Can You Pump Water Without Any Electricity?


To see if those videos of people conjuring liquid without any external power actually hold water, you’ll need physics—and a straw.

If you haven’t seen these before, they often show someone sticking some pipes into water and shaking them back and forth until all of a sudden they start spouting endless quantities of liquid. Physics spoiler alert: There are actually two methods to move water that don't require an external power source—but that’s not the same thing as running on free energy. And that leads us to one last problem: Even if you had an impossibly efficient generator that was powered by the falling water from the ram pump, it still wouldn’t give you free energy.

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