The Arrival of Fortune in a Droplet
HAORAN SUN
Award: Top 100
Award: 3rd Place Contrived
School: the experimental high school attached to beijing normal university
Teacher: xiaoqin feng
Category: Contrived
Photo #21567
The Arrival of Fortune in a Droplet
"During the Chinese New Year, people traditionally paste the Chinese character "Fu" for ""fortune"" upside down on doors. In Mandarin, the word for ""upside down"" and the word for ""to arrive"" are exact homophones. Thus, an inverted character phonetically and visually declares: ""Fortune has arrived."" This photograph beautifully recreates this cultural pun through the elegant physics of fluid mechanics and optics.
To capture the photo, I displayed the upright Chinese character "Fu" on a smartphone, which I then covered with a tempered glass screen protector sprinkled with water. Its oleophobic, low-surface-energy coating drastically reduces water adhesion. As a result, the cohesive forces of the water molecules dominate, increasing the contact angle and forcing the droplets into plump, spherical shapes, creating many little convex lenses.
As light from the screen passes through these droplets, it refracts. Because the screen is positioned at a distance significantly greater than twice the focal length of these water lenses, the refracted rays converge to produce real, inverted, and diminished images within each drop.
Through the simple but elegant interplay of surface tension and optical refraction, the laws of physics naturally invert the character, and the resulting phenomenon perfectly manifests the traditional blessing."
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