Scientists used children’s ‘silly sprinklers’ to solve a physics problem Richard Feynman could not; the reverse version spins 50 times slower

If you’ve ever watched a “silly sprinkler” in action (those bright, looping contraptions that twist and spray water in wild patterns) you’ve probably just seen them as summer fun. But a group of mathematicians have turned these backyard toys into tools for solving a famous physics puzzle that stumped even Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman.That puzzle is known as Feynman’s Sprinkler Problem. At its core, it asks a simple question: What happens if you run a sprinkler in reverse, so instead of spraying water out, it sucks water in?For decades, the answer was surprisingly hard to pin down.Now, thanks to experiments with both standard sprinklers and wiggly “silly” ones, researchers say they finally have a clear, tested explanation, and it tells us a lot about how moving fluids push, twist and spin the objects around them, according to Science Daily.The question: What does a “reverse” sprinkler actually do?A regular lawn…