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Re:An Odd Card Trick by alasdair_ on Thursday November 25, 2021 @11:43PM (#29347541)
The wine and water explanation doesn’t make sense to me. Wine and water have different molar masses and combining a liter of water and a liter of wine doesn’t give exactly two liters of the new substance, in the same way as a liter of ping pong balls and a liter of sand doesn’t produce two liters of ping pong sand when mixed together - some of the molecules are bigger than some of the others.

Once you pour a liter of the new, mixed, wine-water substance back into the first container, you’ll likely have less than a liter in the second container, so the wine bottle will contain more than the container originally containing water. Right?

Re:An Odd Card Trick by dreamcompiler on Friday November 26, 2021 @12:47AM (#29347787)
If you mix 1 liter of pure alcohol with 1 liter of pure water, you'll end up with less than 2 liters of liquid. But wine is a little bit of alcohol already mixed with a lot of water, so the "interstitial molecular crowding" will have already happened. So 1L of wine + 1L of water produces 2L total.
Re:An Odd Card Trick by gus_massa on Friday November 26, 2021 @12:36AM (#29347732)
The article is about mathematical water and mathematical wine. They have additive volumes.

Real water and real wine are more complicates. More generally, after mixing some water and some ethanol the volume of the mix is smaller than the sum of the volumes. And this is not only a theoretical result, it's possible to measure the difference experimentally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume#Volume_chang...

Re:An Odd Card Trick by nkrisc on Friday November 26, 2021 @07:05AM (#29349497)
Fine, replace the water and wine with two different liquids that have exactly the same molar mass.

You’re missing the point of the example by thinking of it as real. There’s no actual water or wine here.

Re:An Odd Card Trick by graup on Friday November 26, 2021 @12:29AM (#29347708)
I think you made the same mistake that I made when I first read it. The question isn't "what contains more wine?" but "compare the amount of water in A to the amount of wine in B."

Step 1: A with 10 L wine; B with 10 L water

Step 2: A with 9 L wine; B with 11 L liquid (10 L water and 1 L wine => 10/11 water, 1/11 wine)

Step 3: A with 10/11 * 1/11 = 10/11^2 L water; B with 1/11 * 10/11 = 10/11^2 L wine.

10 / 11*2 water in A ~ 10 / 11^2 wine in B.

Re:An Odd Card Trick by daveFNbuck on Friday November 26, 2021 @01:19AM (#29347911)
You're misunderstanding the objection. They're saying that if you move 1L of wine to the water side, the side you poured into will have fewer than 11L and when you pour 1L back the two sides won't have equal volume.
Re:An Odd Card Trick by ZeroGravitas on Friday November 26, 2021 @03:55AM (#29348503)
Excluding the physical elements, it still seems a poor, possibly actively misleading (or should I say misdirecting), analogy.

The better way to understand it is to use only two cards, one face up one face down, if you give one to each person randomly, how can you magically match the other person? By flipping the card, because for every down you have, the other person has one up.

Re:An Odd Card Trick by shawabawa3 on Friday November 26, 2021 @04:24AM (#29348656)
You are being pedantic

Most people won't consider the sub ml change in volume

Re:An Odd Card Trick by GoldenGateBRDG on Friday November 26, 2021 @01:16AM (#29347901)
Re:An Odd Card Trick by jml7c5 on Friday November 26, 2021 @02:37AM (#29348175)
Is there a name for this in English?
Re:An Odd Card Trick by grzm on Friday November 26, 2021 @02:39AM (#29348183)
Looks like it's Pearson's Square or the Box Method:

https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/111440/is-ther...

Re:An Odd Card Trick by d--b on Friday November 26, 2021 @12:33AM (#29347724)
No, it’s not like ping pong balls and sand. A liter of water and a liter of wine definitely make 2 liters of liquid…
Re:An Odd Card Trick by anamexis on Friday November 26, 2021 @01:18AM (#29347910)
Not quite. Mixing alcohol and water results in a different total volume than the sum of the two before mixing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume#Volume_chang...