Physicists have a reputation for caring about the grandest questions: the formation of the universe, the collisions of black holes, the nature of time and space.

But Sidney Nagel was also curious about the more modest things that make up the texture of our world. The physics as a raindrop stretches and falls from an overhang. Why a spill from a coffee cup forms a ring instead of a spot. The shifting of grains of sand.

“No one thought you’d find basic truths by looking at these sorts of things,” he said. “But the fact that we don’t know how to think about answering these questions means there’s some fundamental physics we don’t know.”

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