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The Chaotic Drip

© Copyright 2000, Jim Loy

To the left we see three drawings of my faucet. The normal situation is at the left, with a steady drip, very regular. On the right is a fairly steady stream of water, also very regular. If I adjust the handle so that it is dripping quite a bit, but it is just barely short of a steady stream, we get a chaotic drip, very irregular. Both the steady drip and the steady stream are easily described by physics and hydrodynamics. In the original version of this article, I said, "The chaotic drip can only be understood within the context of chaos theory." Of course "only" is an exaggeration. As in most chaotic situations, classical physics explains this situation very well. But thinking about the equations, chaotic behavior is something of a surprise. And if you tried to work out the pattern of the drips from classical physics, you would soon have a horrendous mass of unmanageably complicated equations which would convince you that the drip pattern is unpredictable for all practical purposes.

This may be a good science fair experiment. It takes some delicate adjustment to get the chaotic flow. But you can either show this chaotic flow in real time, or show movies of it, or show still photographs of it.

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