Originally posted by Bedlam
No big deal. What you're seeing falls into the larger group of phenomena we call 'aliasing', and the subset of that called the stroboscopic effect.

Whenever you see videos of helicopters with the blades not turning, or cars moving forward when the wheels appear to be turning backwards, it's the same thing as this. Note that the instructions say to set the shutter speed to 24 fps, then diddle the audio generator between 23 and 25 hz. That causes aliasing between the water motion caused by the speaker and the shutter rate of the camera, and voila! weird stop motions and things that appear to be moving backwards.

Seeing as how you had to explain all of that, I'd say it is a pretty big deal.

Originally posted by Vandettas

Seeing as how you had to explain all of that, I'd say it is a pretty big deal.

Not really. I just assume most ATSers are not technical and need an explanation. Like I say, I was doing this in middle school.

Seems like a good physical macro-scale representation of what's considered wave/particle duality. The stream of water consists of particles, but it also acts as waveform. I'd think that this is similar to what continuous streams of electrons/photons do in terms of ability to carry information.

Now I'm curious as to how water spray affected like this spreads out when directed through a slit or double slit. (See if it's also possible to reproduce a quantum/optical experiment on a macro scale.)

This would be cool to have as a display in my house but having to set it up in another room and have a camerea filming at 24fps and then displaying that on a monitor.... not so cool anymore.

This would be cool to have as a display in my house but having to set it up in another room and have a camerea filming at 24fps and then displaying that on a monitor.... not so cool anymore.