T ake a bowl of clear viscous oil.
Poke a hole in its bottom so the oil can drip slowly out, drop by drop by drop. Point a high- speed video lens at it, film 12,000 frames per second, and you'll get something like Linda Smolka's movie. In the beginning the drop just hangs there, then the thread gets longer, the drop becomes more spherical. Those actions leave a bit of the oily filament abandoned, strung out between orifice and drop, unattached to either. A graduate student in mathematics, Smolka is studying the equations that describe the complicated creation of such drops.