Two hundred years of capillarity research

Capilarity is applied in many modern fields including oceanography and materials science, two centuries after the work by Pierre-Simon Laplace and Thomas Young. Capillary phenomena are relevant mostly for the surface of liquids in contact with their vapor and are significant for defining the shape of crystals. The overall trend on the free-surface side of capillarity research has been a shift from static shapes to the dynamics of free-surface flows, breakup, and fragmentation. Capillarity phenomena have the distinguished feature of being rooted at a very small scale, yet having consequences at macroscopic scales.