I remember in my first chemistry lessons at high school my teacher told us about atomic properties of materials elastics and stiffness and what ever else. At one point he came up with an example of an (theoretical?)liquid that would even crawl out of its vessel to overcome differences in gravity, desiring to get to closest to the gravity well as possible and even overcoming obstacles by trying to achieve this. Back then the idea quiet fascinated me, fascinated me enough to think every few years about it again.

But today, my self being a hobby astro physician and having at least a layman understanding of how gravity works, I start questioning his statement. I can't really understand how a substance could gain that "information" to when it can get closer to the source of gravity by a ratio between energy required to overcome the obstacle to gain in range reduction to teh gravity source.

So my question is, what was the substance he was refering to? Does such a substance exist? And if so, how does it work?

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    $\begingroup$ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_helium-4 (don't know any more, so can't give you anything more than the link) $\endgroup$ – orthocresol Jul 20 '17 at 6:36
  • $\begingroup$ @orthocresol: Quite different in the reasons why it behaves like that from what my teacher back then explained, but in it self sounds like it could have been what he was referring to. Sad that you have not more specific knowledge about it. $\endgroup$ – Zaibis Jul 20 '17 at 6:42
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    $\begingroup$ I think @orthocresol pretty much answered your main question. Regarding the second part on how this happens beyond the wikipedia article, I'm afraid you need to dive deep into macroscopic quantum mechanics effects, and it's going to be a long reading, there are book chapters if not the entire books devoted to superfluids. $\endgroup$ – andselisk Jul 20 '17 at 7:25
  • $\begingroup$ @andselisk: yeah definetly it answered my questions. But sadly I can't accept a comment as answer. Also as he mentioned that he can just give me the link and a link only answer would not be fine. Thats why I said that its sad. $\endgroup$ – Zaibis Jul 20 '17 at 7:31
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    $\begingroup$ Most liquids will move to a lower potential energy environment using the common device of the syphon. $\endgroup$ – matt_black Jul 20 '17 at 8:42

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