ooblick magick

[nibot]

We all know that cornstarch + water (otherwise known as ooblick) is amazing stuff. However, these guys in texas at the center for nonlinear dynamics have taken it to a new level. If nothing else, you should check out the paper and definitely the movie. I wonder if this could be repeated just using a loudspeaker and function generator? Yet another reason to procrastinate on studying for finals!

[edit: you're too late! I guess the movie was "slashdotted," as it's no longer available from their web page. )-: edit2: nevermind, they fixed it.]

[edit3: here's an experiment with solitons that you can do on the surface of a pool: Falaco Solitons. Check out the paper gr-qc/0101098 in arXiv. "String theorists take note, for the structure consists of a pair of topological 2-dimensional rotational defects in a surface of discontinuity, globally connected and stabilized by a 1 dimensional topological defect or string."]

On another note, I'm curious how much of antenna theory can be co-opted to make antennas for sound. A yagi for sound seems a bit unlikely, but parabolic reflectors certainly work, and it seems that there ought to be some magic with cavity resonators.

Comments

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

oh, i have such a soft spot in my little heart for fluid dynamics. seeing stuff like this makes me reluctant to leave my current research.

and i'll admit: the first thing i thought when i clicked through the links was, "i should have gone to grad school there!"

i've never made ooblick, but i probably should. and this business of the glass spheres is verrrrry interesting to me right now.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I got the movie from your link to it!

Pretty fancy stuff...

They said the acceleration was 15g and then 25g at 120 Hz, and it seems unlikely you could get a loudspeaker to do something that powerful. I don't understand why we didn't hear an extremely loud pitch though if there was something vibrating at that frequency. And was the camera moving too, or was it just extremely small vibrations?

[yonked.livejournal.com]

Wow. You're posts always make me feel so... not dumb... but, incurious in comparison. Nice links today. The movie I noticed originally from a mechanical engineering friend. He had a list of several interesting 'weird' fluid movies which he had to analyze for a class.

I wonder how small a body of water you can have in which to demonstrate Falaco solitons. Hmm... conjecturing that the galaxies are Falaco solitons seems pretty wacky, since there is no fluid discontinuity such as the swimming pool surface.

[shamster.livejournal.com]

Why do y'all think it was done using a loudspeaker? The paper says nothing more than "shaker".

btw - any knowledge of where the 'full' paper is published? I recall most phys-rev-lett's as shorter versions of the real deal.