Milk drop collider
Published by admin July 29th, 2007 in PhysicsThis image1 is a good analogy of physicists’ understanding of constitution of matter:
Here’s a collider where two fluids collide and form new forms of the same fluid.
Physicists too let fluid collide with fluid and observe “ultimate fundamental and indivisible constituents of matter” in the resulting fluid.
- Photographed by Harold Edgerton [↩]
The analogy becomes more meaningful when you consider why the impact has a broken symmetry, as Bee remarked time ago.
And if you go into the maths, you probably must do an eigenfunction decomposition of the shock wave. I’d guess that different values of density and viscosity would select different eigenfunctions and then different number of spikes in the crown.
Alejandro,
Thanks for your comment. Did Bee’s remarks pertain to this picture? Do you have a link?
The point I was trying to make in the post was that the milk drops are not “ultimate building blocks of matter.” Similarly, when physicists collide faster moving fluids in a collider what they observe are different forms of the colliding fluids. What is the justification that the collusion of continuous fluids results in absolute discontinuities?