Event

Place a drop of water on an icy surface—it crystallizes at the point of contact, and a slow ice front steadily grows upwards. Place a bubble instead, and a burst of ice crystals erupts across its interface, far from where it touches the surface. Now, place a collection of dew drops—they start ‘talking’ to each other, freezing in succession, breaking the stochasticity of the nucleation process. The ordinary freezing of drops and bubbles hides a fascinating array of rich, emergent phenomena, far from the ordinary.

In the language of experiments and scaling laws, I will explore the nature and origins of these intriguing behaviors—how surfaces lie at the heart of interfacial phenomena that decorate soft condensed matter physics. Drawing on examples from my research, I will show how a surface, far from being merely a boundary, often defines and dictates the very nature of the system it bounds and the phenomena that follow.

I will conclude by reflecting on how the same surfaces that shape drops and bubbles also leave their imprint on the patterns of our climate—from the formation of clouds to the withering of plants—drawing on the poem of Wallace Stevens, whose words echo in the title of my talk: Of the Surface of Things.