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Strange 3D-printed shapes test 150-year-old mathematical theory

A strange shape described by mathematician Lord Kelvin in 1871 and predicted to behave unusually in a fluid has finally been fully studied in the real world thanks to 3D printing – and it seems Kelvin may have been wrong. The behavior of the shape, called an isotropic helicoid, has been described in fluid dynamics textbooks, but it hadn’t been directly measured until now.

An isotropic helicoid must experience the same amount of drag from a fluid regardless of its orientation, like a sphere, but also rotate as it moves through the fluid. So if you dropped an isotropic helicoid into a tank of a viscous liquid, it should spin as it sinks, similar to the way a propeller turns.

Greg Voth at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his colleagues 3D printed five different shapes that should be isotropic helicoids, each a little more than a centimetre across, and dropped them into a tank of silicone oil. They were unable to detect rotation in any of them, meaning the predictions for an isotropic helicoid may be wrong.

“You’ve got to guess that somebody else has tried this in 150 years – in Kelvin’s original paper, it even sounds like he tried it,” says Voth. “I suspect that people have tried to fabricate these particles, but they were limited by defects in the fabrication so they simply didn’t publish, so the hypothesis of this behaviour has stayed with us.”

Upon delving into the hydrodynamic effects in play, the researchers calculated that there was almost certainly a link, or coupling, between the movement and rotation of their particles, meaning they fulfilled Kelvin’s criteria. But this was far too small to have any detectable effect.

“The coupling is tiny, but it still exists,” says Voth. He and his team are now working on building an isotropic helicoid where that coupling could be measurable, which would finally vindicate Lord Kelvin’s idea.

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The World’s Oldest Bottle of Whiskey Just Sold for $137,500

Carbon dating says the spirit was likely bottled between 1763 and 1803.

A bottle containing what is believed to be the world’s oldest whiskey just sold for way more than anyone was expecting.

The handle of Old Ingledew Whiskey went for a staggering $137,500 on Wednesday following a spirited round of bidding overseen by Skinner Auctioneers, reports CNN. The gavel price absolutely shatters the $20,000 to $40,000 the spirit had been expected to sell for before the sale.

So why did this bottle, go for nearly $100,000 more than its high-end estimate? One reason: its age. Though the whiskey was long thought to date back to 1850, a recent laboratory test conducted by the University of Georgia and University of Glasgow revealed it’s actually much older. A sample of liquid was taken from the bottle and carbon tested; the results revealed an 81.1 percent likelihood that the whiskey was actually bottled between 1763 and 1803, putting it in the historical context of the Revolutionary War and Whiskey Rebellion.

This particular bottle of Old Ingledew also has an interesting backstory. It once belonged to Wall Street financier John Pierpoint Morgan, the founder of what would eventually become JP Morgan Chase & Co., who obtained the whiskey on a business trip to Georgia, according to Barron’s. But he was far from the bottle’s only famous owner. His son Jack gifted the bottle to future US Supreme Court justice and South Carolina governor James Byrnes in the early 1940s. Jack also gave two other bottles to Franklin D. Roosevelt (they were distant cousins) and Harry S. Truman. Skinner’s rare spirits expert, Joseph Hyman, said that the bottle that sold this week is only one that survives.

As shocking as the bottle’s final price may be—it’s not often that a lot sells for more than three times its pre-auction estimate—it doesn’t make Old Ingeldew the world’s most expensive whiskey. Far from it, in fact. That title currently belongs to a bottle of Macallan Fine and Rare 60-Year-Old 1926 that sold for $1.9 million in 2019. But the title of world’s oldest? That belongs to this bottle and this bottle alone.