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Recipe for Making Symetrical Holes in Water
scottZed writes "Danish researchers found a simple way to make curiously shaped air holes in a bucket of water. Simply rig the bucket to have a spinning plate at the bottom, and depending on the speed, you can get an ellipse, three-sided star, square, pentagon, or hexagon. The effect may help explain such shapes seen in atmospheric disturbances on Earth and other planets. One practical use: really trippy washing machines."
I'm curious about the researcher's name, Tomas Bohr, any relation to Niels?
Quoted from the article .." These natural structures have never been fully explained. Could they be produced by the effect observed by the Danish team? "I expect that similar conditions might apply in these atmospheric flows," says Bohr. But he admits that at this stage he doesn't understand the pattern-forming process well enough to be sure of the comparison.
Swinney, meanwhile, thinks that the process is unlikely to apply to large-scale flows such as that on Saturn, but might be relevant to smaller-scale phenomena such as tornadoes."
Seems that they realize that this is but baby steps, and there needs to be much more work done.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
It's how you decipher something that makes it an explanation.
Einstein's equations of general relativity don't really explain anything unless you understand the math. To anyone else, they're just kooky looking symbols. To many people these may just be buckets with spinning water in them. To these researchers they may turn out to be explanations.