During a lecture titled “The Life and Death of a Drop,” University of Chicago physics professor Sidney Nagel compared the formation, transformations and termination of droplets to various stages of human existence, including birth, teenage years and a mid-life crisis.
Nagel spoke to University of Wisconsin-Madison students and community members about his personal work and the science behind liquid drops at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery Wednesday.
He said much of his experimentation consisted of altering variables like the viscosity, density and surface tension of liquids to observe the changes in drop behavior. Additionally, he has spent a long time studying droplets under varying degrees of atmospheric pressure and has discovered that certain levels yield little to no splash.
Studying liquid drops is important because of the ubiquity of their behavior, according to Nagel. He explained the principles that apply to the microscopic realm also have applications in other scientific spheres, as do the ways of assessing them.
“Each step of a drop’s life arouses astonishment,” he said. “Nature is subtle, but we have tools to decipher her code.”
During the presentation, Nagel used pictures and videos to enhance his speech and communicate to readers the diverse motivations for his research.
“I’m trying to tell you why this is important physics to know, but I’m showing this movie for another reason. This is an uncommonly beautiful thing to watch,” he said, showing magnified footage of a single drop.
“It’s that aesthetic sense which has just as much compelled me to study this as the importance of the science itself. I really believe that this is a perfectly good reason to study this behavior.”
The talk was part of the WID’s John von Neumann Public Lecture Series in Complexity and Computation, a sequence which has, until now, focused on “collections, aggregates [and] the macro scale,” WID Director David Krakauer said.
In contrast, Nagel’s presentation centered on the microcosm, “an incredibly complex world which we usually treat as homogeneous,” Krakauer said.
Justin Perry, a third-year graduate student of nuclear engineering at UW-Madison said his interest in the lectures was initially piqued by a previous presentation on the spread of illness in populations.
Perry said the significance of the speaker’s message varies based upon who is listening.
“For me, as a scientist, the technical aspects are very interesting,” he said. “I don’t think that the content of the material is really important for most people to know, but it’s the idea of the using the scientific process to understand something in everyday life.”
