HERE’S a Zen-like question. If a drop of liquid falls on a flat surface and there is no air around it, does it make a splash?
The answer, which may or may not help you reach nirvana, is no. “This was to us an incredibly surprising result,” says Sidney Nagel of the University of Chicago in Illinois. “If you didn’t have the air, you couldn’t splash. This means you would never get splashing on the moon.”
Nagel and fellow physicists Lei Xu and Wendy Zhang were trying to measure the energy of liquid droplets flying away from splashing drops of…
