Bouncing Water Drops

2009-11-10 | Filed Under SteveG's Posts |

What’s old is new. Watch this video of water bouncing off a surface.



The pictures of this are interesting even if the explanation is probably somewhat off the mark.  I guess it takes a physicist rather than a mathematician to explain the observation.


There is an article on softpedia.com Understanding Water Drop Back-Jet Physics that has a more physical explanation.  They also completed a high-detail computer model of the phenomenon, one that comprises more than 30,000 frames per second.



Picture from above article







For even more physics there is the article Between bouncing and splashing: water drops on a solid surface.


My freshman adviser at MIT, Harold Edgerton, made a famous milk drop photograph in 1957.  



Milk Drop Photo









Harold Edgerton was an electrical engineer and began to take photographs as scientific experiments. In his first, he tried to produce a perfect coronet from a single drop of milk falling into liquid. To do this he invented the stroboscope – a device to produce short bursts of light. This allowed him to take split-second pictures of objects in motion which could not be seen by the human eye, including bullets and hummingbirds in flight, light bulbs shattering, and athletes in action. Some of his photographs had an exposure time of less than 1/10,000 of a second.



       
        


	

	
Post Linx
	
	Permalink | Trackback | 	
	 | 
	Print This Page | Leave a Comment

	


	
	
	
	
        

        


	

	
Comments




			

	 



Leave a Reply



You must be logged in to post a comment.