Splash

A Worthington-Edgerton splash is a single droplet hitting still liquid, photographed at the instant the crown forms. The whole event is over in a few milliseconds, which means there is no version of it you can see with your eyes and no version you can catch by reacting to it.

The camera does not freeze it either. A shutter is far too slow. What freezes it is the flash: the room is dark, the shutter is already open, and the only light in the entire exposure is one burst a few hundred microseconds wide.

An Arduino holds the timing. It pulses a peristaltic pump to release a drop, waits a set delay, then fires the flash, and the shutter closes around it. Change that delay and you get a different moment in the same event: the impact, the crater, the jet rising back out of it, the crown, or a second drop landing on the jet before it falls.

Everything else was varied by hand between shots: fluid mixture, surface, backdrop, colour. Glow-stick fluid, glycerol, water, cream. The viscoelastic mixtures are the ones that produce filaments, which is why several of these have visible threads connecting the fragments.