My question is would this be possible with a strobe light? Or even better, a florescent light? That would make some very impressive shows, if you could have a whole hallway with different streams, all synchronized to the frequency that the lights strobe at.
think about an old tire rolling through paint. you'll see the same artifacts every revolution of the tire. the key idea is every cycle creates the same pattern.
so, you could have a mechanical system that hit the tube every /24th of a second, and you'd get some effect, but i think it would be hard to get the impact and recovery to be EXACTLY the same, or close enough you don't notice.
If you use sound to squeeze the tube, rather than pushing on it, the distortion and recovery are much more consistent, so you get the same pattern. I'd guess you don't have much control over where the drops actually appear. you'd have to wiggle the tube around on the speaker to get the right distortion.
I've done it in an almos empty disco, with some strobes and a cord with a key(or any other weight) at the end. I turned around the key (like using a sling). Playing a bit is pretty easy to make the key stop in the air like pointing in the direction you choose.
Also you can see the effect in some videos of flying helicopters, they seem to be flying with the rotor freezed. It is Pretty cool!
That's an interesting idea, and it should be possible with a strobe. A florescent light oscillates too quickly though; the gap between the water droplets is going to be inversely proportionate to the frequency of the sine wave.
I've seen it at a children's science museum, forget which one. They had a dark box you could look into with some kind of strobe which produced this effect in the box.
