Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
The Lava Lamps That Secure the Internet
A wall of lava lamps in a San Francisco office currently helps keep about 10% of the Internet’s traffic secure. Internet security company Cloudflare uses a video feed of the lava lamps as one of the inputs to the algorithms they use to generate large random numbers for encryption. The concept dates back to a…
Water Atop Oil
At first glance, this image looks much like the impact of any drop on a pool of the same liquid, but that’s not what you’re seeing. This is the impact of a water droplet on a thin film of oil, and the immiscibility of those two fluids has important effects on the collision. When the…
Jumping Droplets
Condensation, which removes heat by changing a vapor into a liquid, is a common feature in industrial heat transfer. When droplets form on surfaces, they typically have to grow to millimeter size before gravity causes them to slide off and open up the surface to new droplet formation. Hydrophobic surfaces can shed droplets a little…
Seeing the Wake
Hot exhaust gases churn in the wake of this climbing B-1B Lancer. The high temperature of the exhaust changes the density and, thus, the refractive index of the gases relative to the atmosphere. Light traveling through the exhaust gets distorted, making the highly turbulent flow visible to the human eye. Note how the four individual…
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Resources
This is the final post in a collaborative series with FYP on pilot-wave hydrodynamics. Previous posts: 1) Introduction; 2) Chladni patterns; 3) Faraday instability; 4) Walking droplets; 5) Droplet lattices; 6) Quantum double-slit experiments; 7) Hydro single- and double-slit experiments; 8) Quantum tunneling; 9) Hydrodynamic tunneling; 10) de Broglie’s pilot-wave theory Thanks for joining us this…
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Droplet Tunneling
This post is part of a collaborative series with FYP on pilot-wave hydrodynamics. Previous posts: 1) Introduction; 2) Chladni patterns; 3) Faraday instability; 4) Walking droplets; 5) Droplet lattices; 6) Quantum double-slit experiments; 7) Hydro single- and double-slit experiments; 8) Quantum tunneling Quantum tunneling is a strange subatomic behavior that was first described to explain…
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Slit Experiments
This post is part of a collaborative series with FYP on pilot-wave hydrodynamics. Previous entries: 1) Introduction; 2) Chladni patterns; 3) Faraday instability; 4) Walking droplets; 5) Droplet lattices; 6) Quantum double-slit experiments In quantum mechanics, the single and double-slit experiments are foundational. They demonstrate that light and elementary particles like electrons have wave-like and…
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Walking Drops
This post is a collaborative series with FYP on pilot-wave hydrodynamics. Previous entries: 1) Introduction; 2) Chladni patterns; 3) Faraday instability If you place a small droplet atop a vibrating pool, it will happily bounce like a kid on a trampoline. On the surface, this seems quite counterintuitive: why doesn’t the droplet coalesce with the…
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Faraday Instability
This post is part of a collaborative series with FYP on pilot-wave hydrodynamics. Previous entries: 1) Introduction; 2) Chladni patterns In 1831, in an appendix to a paper on Chladni plate patterns, physicist Michael Faraday wrote: “When the upper surface of a plate vibrating so as to produce sound is covered with a layer of…
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Introduction
For the next week on FYFD, I’ll be doing something a little different. I’ve teamed up with FYP to produce a joint series of posts on pilot-wave hydrodynamics, a recent area of investigation on fluid systems that display quantum mechanical behaviors. We’ve touched on some aspects of this previously, but this series will get into…