this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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Physics question: since sand in an hourglass exerts more force when it’s flowing downward than it does at rest, will the rising and falling of the wax make the chandelier very slightly wobble? 🤔
That is super interesting about the hourglass. I never considered that, but it makes sense. The sand is transitioning from a higher energy state to a lower one within a gravitational field. Each grain gains momentum during the fall, then exerts that force on the structure when it hits the bottom.
The lava lamps don't start in a stored energy state. They add thermal energy that causes the convection, but the entire time there's a conservation of momentum within the lamps.
It's super cool idea, but I'm pretty sure the chandelier would be stable, not wobbly.
The wax itself moves constantly around the lamp and has mass. Since the frequency this occurs in and the mass within each blob that moves up or down is somewhat random, I would imagine there are times when more mass moves up than down in different parts of the chandelier.
I would expect that it would ever-so-slightly wobble because of that.
Conclusion: we have our opposing theories and an experimental design.
We must test this, for science!
That wax is displacing water. Wax go up, displaced water go down. And they have very similar densities since the movement is so slow. So the net movement of mass is even smaller than what you'd assume.
There is still some movement, more importantly there is some rotational movement as water and wax swap places. So there is some gyroscopic effect exists, stronger than the linear forces.
So if that chain has too little friction (or if it was a string instead of chain) and the chandelier itself not so much mass that will absolutely dominate the lamps, then indeed some really chaotic and even otherworldly wobbling could be seen due to rotational momentum.
But I'm afraid it would be absorbed by the chandelier mass and the friction on the chain.
It would have to be very slight indeed, since the wax needs to be close to neutrally buoyant in order to rise and fall with the heat currents.
When the sand is falling, it's not exerting force. It only exerts force when it hits the bottom. There would probably be a reduction in overall weight when the sand starts falling for a split second, and a corresponding increase as the last few grains hit the bottom. But in the middle, the weight would be more or less constant, give or take random fluctuations.
Did you watch the action lab the other day too? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVzqEn_qyFM
very slightly, the weight difference is so miniscule I doubt it'd even look like it were wobbling, and due to other friction in the system may not even register at all.
The water in the lava lamp does the opposite so it balances out.
That only makes this idea better.
Not likely enough to be noticeable without special extremely sensitive instruments. The wax has low mass and is moving slowly. The glass container has high mass and is at rest. Mathematically, you could derive how much the lamp moves when a wax blob hits the top of the glass. In practice, it's likely to be negligible.