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We hope you enjoy the fun, whimsy and wonder of these selected works from Martin Waugh. Please take a moment and see where your imagination takes you.
Image of water drops
This site has a large gallery of water drop photographs. You need to have Javascript enabled to see all of the images.
Martin Waugh's Liquid Sculpture images are water art photos of liquid shapes that were created by dropping and splashing water, or other liquids. These sculptures are then photographed using high-speed photography.
A simple water droplet is beautiful, but when two drops collide, the varieties are endless and fascinating. The shapes are affected by many things: the physical properties of the liquid, such as surface tension and viscosity, as well as the timing of the drops and when the camera's shutter is opened and flash fired. Being experiments in fluid dynamics, they reveal the chaotic nature of fluid flow - it can be quite reproducible sometimes, and other times highly sensitive to initial conditions.
Places to learn more about water drops: Wikipedia discusses some about the surface tension of water and how it helps form drops. The hydrodynamics of water drops are complex, and ever-fascinating for physicists. A very clever device created a hundred years ago by Lord Kelvin uses water drops to create static electricity. Of course, NASA can't resist experimenting with water drops in zero-gravity. An interesting result recently showed up: if there isn't any atmosphere, water drops don't splash on a dry surface. Wendy W. Zhang from the University of Chicago presented an illuminating paper on capturing liquid motion and water drops in Boulder in 2006.
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