So you thought filling water into a tank was boring? Not on my watch!

This is how we fill up the tank: Through a hole at the bottom. Which leads to a very nice fountain that slowly submerges as the water level rises:

…and to tons of nice waves, which are great to observe!

Propagation of waves

Below you see waves propagating. Can you spot the water’s orbital movement, i.e. water particles moving in circles, even though the wave phase is propagating from left to right?

Standing waves

After a while, waves are reflected at the end of the tank and propagate back, setting up a different, very cool, pattern:

Now the wave phase does not seem to travel any more! Instead, there are fixed points in space where water levels oscillate between maximum and minimum, and in between there are other points where the water level stays more or less the same. How cool is that?!

…And this is just filling the tank. Just wait how cool it gets when we are actually running our demonstrations! :-)