Somewhere in between bouncy solids and spreading liquids, partially filled containers display unintuitive outcomes when they hit hard surfaces. Such is the appealing landing of a water bottle without bouncing, which converted the water bottle flip challenge into a hundred-million-viewer viral video, an unprecedented success for an internet video that involves fluid dynamics.
This video for the Gallery of Fluid Motion explains how the seemly unpredictable bounce of a partially filled container can be mastered by simply swirling the bottle content, unraveling a fantastic fluid-dynamics chain of events rushing after the other before, during, and after a water bottle impacts against a hard surface.
To read more about these experiments, we encourage you to try them at home, follow the link: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.244001
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