Fluids at Rest

Hydrostatics is the branch of physics that studies the properties of fluids at rest — as opposed to hydrodynamics, which studies fluids in motion (taken up starting in section 2.5 of this chapter). All of the properties developed in sections 2.3 and 2.4 below — pressure, Pascal's law, surface tension, capillarity — are properties of a fluid in static equilibrium, and hydrostatics is the umbrella term for that en …