Baffling Images That Seem To Make Absolutely No Physical Sense

But there are laws that haven’t stood the test of time. Some, like Bode’s law, Sutter explains, “were overturned almost as soon as they were stated.” Others he calls “in-between” laws—not quite wrong, but not complete on their own. As he puts it, “These are the laws that hold true, but as we discover more about the universe, we find that they are just a subset of a larger understanding of the cosmos.” Newton’s law of universal gravitation, for instance, “still works in most of the universe, but in more intense scenarios, like around a black hole, or when more precision is needed, like when calculating GPS coordinates, you need to ‘break’ Newton’s law and upgrade to relativity.”

Some laws of physics are still being challenged today. As Sutter puts it, “Some are actively being broken right now, which is a good thing, because that means there’s more to learn about the universe.” One recent example comes from Anthony Raykh, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who unexpectedly disrupted a process governed by the laws of thermodynamics—yes, the ones Homer Simpson famously insisted his household obey.

More specifically, Raykh was experimenting with emulsification—the process of combining liquids that don’t naturally mix, like oil and water. If you think of your favorite salad dressing, you see this in action: when you shake it, the ingredients mix together. But as Darren Orf writes for Popular Mechanics, “That very same process got strange” when Raykh “mixed a batch of immiscible liquids along with magnetized nickel particles.” Instead of mixing as expected, the mixture formed what the researchers described as a “Grecian urn” shape. No matter how much he shook it, it eventually returned to the same shape.

Further investigation showed that the strong magnetism was bending the boundary between the liquids and interfering with the usual emulsification process. It may not have any immediate practical applications, but as Orf writes, “it is a never-before-seen state that could expand the field of soft-matter physics.” For us, at least, it’s a reminder that when it comes to describing the mysterious ways in which our world works, the centuries-old field of physics still has a few surprises up its sleeve. Which brings us back to these wonderfully baffling images...