90-year-old Israeli-American professor of physics Amnon Yariv may have just repeated history by discovering something while in the bathroom. Four years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the physicist first noticed something while taking a shower, which, over years of work, has been confirmed to be a new mode of vibration in nature.
Yariv noticed that the showerhead wasn’t just a flexible fixture in the bathroom but displayed properties of being part of the oscillating system. Legend says that the Greek physicist Archimedes ran immediately out of the bath two millennia ago upon making a ground-breaking observation. The modern-day scientist Yariv was more measured in this approach. Yariv noticed that as he increased the water flow, the showerhead oscillated bimodally.
“This bimodal oscillation is like an Argentinian tango, where each dancer has to remain completely in sync with the other or else they stumble on each other,” said Yariv in a press release. “The idea that a steady force can be used to excite this kind of entangled bimodal oscillation has never been proposed nor demonstrated.”
To simplify, Yariv gave an example of a child on a swing that needs an external push to keep swinging. Typically, a parent or friend provides this push. However, as the child grows, s/he learns to push the swing independently, using their legs or weight.