Washing dishes in the kitchen sink has a theory behind it, but no one explained it until now.
Professors Vakhtang Putkaradze and Peter Vorobieff and graduate student Keith Mertens describe the theory and experiment on hydrodynamic instability in a research paper published in Nature, a respected peer-reviewed science magazine.
Putkaradze said Mertens, who Vorobieff credits for 60 percent of the project, was responsible for making the experiment elegant and sophisticated.
Putkaradze said he was excited Mertens had the opportunity to be published in such a well-known scientific publication.
"It's the most prestigious journal there is," Putkaradze said. "It's a nice boost."
Putkaradze also said it is difficult for a math professor like himself to get published in Nature, so he was very excited the paper was accepted for publication.
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"Every scientist in the world reads Nature," Putkaradze said. "It's a lot of visibility."
He said the 700-word essay, titled "Braiding Patterns on an Incline Plane," describes a simple-minded problem.
"It's very familiar, but it hasn't been explained until now," Putkaradze said.
The paper describes a new form of hydrodynamic instability, which is the variation of the height and weight of a stream of water.
For example, if a person were to place a carving board or a flat tray under a faucet and the water could come out at an absolutely steady flow, they would notice the water runs down the plate in a braid formation. It does not meander, Putkaradze said.
But there is always some fluctuation in the flow of tap water or in the flow of rivers and streams, Vorobieff said.
If water were running over a flat surface, like a rock in a stream without a constant flow of water, the water would meander across the surface of the rock, Vorobieff explained.
Vorobieff, a mechanical engineering professor, said publication of the work is important because it is a new type of hydrodynamic instability that has been observed countless times in nature, but now has a theory behind it.
"It's just that people saw it, but saw it without paying attention to it," he said.
He said for the last 20 years, the scientific community thought water meandering across a surface was inevitable. The theory explains water only meanders if the flow rate is not constant.
Vorobieff said if the flow rate is constant, there is a symmetric pattern called braiding that begins to emerge.
Putkaradze said the hardest part was getting the paper through the editors of Nature.
He said it was only about a two-month period from the point of submission to the acceptance of the paper.
He said when sent to the editorial board, they knew the paper had to be of general interest and appeal to a broad audience.
"Every college student should be able to understand it," Putkaradze said.
