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Watering your lawn in the summer can be fun and exciting with what’s called “stupid sprinkler,” designed to create funky loops and swirls for water jets. And there’s some fascinating physics at work to boot. Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute conducted a variety of experiments with a variety of crazy spray designs to find a solution to a long-standing problem in fluid dynamics, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Like it has already been saidThe sprinkler problem is associated with physicist Richard Feynman because he promoted the idea, but it actually originated from another chapter in Ernst Mach’s 1883 book. Science of Mechanics (Mechanics in their development showed history and criticism). Mach’s ideas gradually faded away until a group of physicists at Princeton University began to debate the issue in the 1940s.
Feynman was a graduate student there at the time and happily threw himself into the debate, even setting up an experiment in a cyclotron laboratory to test his ideas. One might think that the back sprinkler works like a regular sprinkler, it’s just played backwards, so to speak. But physics is more complicated. “The answer is obvious at first glance,” Feynman wrote in Of course you’re kidding, Mr. Feynman (1985). “The problem was, one guy might think it made sense (that the swing would be) one way, and another guy might think it made sense another way.”
