Supercomputers Solve a Mystery Hidden Inside Merging Water Droplets
by Rafi Letzter
A team of British physicists and mathematicians used a supercomputer to uncover the hidden truth of how water droplets merge and stick together.
If you've ever watched water droplets touch and merge, you might have imagined two little balls of water getting closer and closer together, until their surfaces overlapped and surface tension pulled the distinct balls together into a single, rough whole. That's what's visible to the naked eye. But a new simulation using a supercomputer, published March 13 in the journal Physical Review Letters, paints a much more complicated picture.