A closer look

Turn your faucet down to a trickle, and the solid stream of water eventually breaks into individual droplets. Félix Savart spent an absurd amount of time in the 1830s measuring the frequency of these breaking jets. He figured out that surface tension makes a cylinder of liquid mathematically unstable, pinching it off into spheres to minimize surface area. So the next time you spill a drink, thank 19th-century hydrodynamics for making the splash optimally messy.