WATER DROPS

The Daily Mail recently ran an article about German artist Markus Reugels' high-speed photos (above) of splashing water drops. He uses color filters but claims there's no digital manipulation...these are just the way the camera saw them.

The mushroom top is fairly common, so is the "skirt" around the middle. But where does the skirt come from?

 Sometimes it comes when a double mushroom appears at the top, and the bottom mushroom expands as it's stretched downward.

It explodes and forms a ring. That kind of ring is easy to explain...but not all rings are like that. Some just seem to appear in the middle.

Here's (above) a better picture of the double mushroom top before the bottom mushroom is torn apart. The long stem explodes at the bottom, maybe (I'm guessing) because its in two parts and the top part is collapsing onto the base.

Why all the interest in water drops? Well, for an artist the appeal is obvious, but there's more to it than that. For a physicist the fascinating part comes when the splash debris expands and thins out. There's a point at which purely mechanical effects recede from our attention and you have to wonder if the indirect results of quantum effects are coming into play.

Weird, unearthly shapes (above) appear for an instant. It's hard to account for some of these, but maybe that's because there's so many variables. The artist sometimes used additives like sugar and Rinse All, and who knows what minerals were in the water?

To understand simple splashes we'll need even more improvements in high speed photography. The world of the small is surprisingly strange and unfamiliar. I read somewhere that no one actually understands how things catch fire. So many chemical and state changes take place in a small amount of time that no one can keep track of it all. The author thought that high speed photography might help, but that it would have to be much improved over the current state of the art.