Normally, a drop of water hitting a flat, repellent surface at low speed will deform slightly and return to its original shape before bouncing. At higher speeds, the drop will flatten like a pancake then retract into a cigarlike shape before leaving the surface. But when microscopic spikes or some other structure is added to the surface, the water droplet undergoes what physicists call maximal deformation and ends up spending less time on the surface. It flattens like a pancake when it lands, then bounces and doesn’t have time to retract until it’s up in the air.

“It’s a quite counterintuitive bounce,” Dr. Hecksher said. “You come down, you spread out, and then you jump off immediately after spreading out without retracting.” It would be like jumping off a table, landing in a flat squat and then bouncing back up still in the squat position.

“Pancake bouncing,” as it was called in the 2014 study, was made possible when the water, held together by surface tension, interacted with those tiny spikes, or microstructure. During impact, some of the water from the droplet is forced in between the spikes, but is ejected quickly by an additional water-repellent coating. The idea can be seen in nature: When water hits a hairy lotus leaf, it beads up and rolls off. It’s called a superhydrophobic surface.

To make this phenomenon easier to fathom, Dr. Hecksher and her students substituted a balloon drop for a water droplet. When the water balloon hit the surface, it underwent the same shape changes as the tiny water droplet. But this time the balloon’s rubber membrane held the water together, not surface tension.

“The mechanisms are slightly different, but the physics is the same,” Dr. Hecksher said.

This scaling tactic isn’t new to physics, which strives to understand how different systems behave similarly — like how an atom’s electrons behave like planets orbiting the sun. By making tiny things giant, Dr. Hecksher and her students produced observations and measurements that couldn’t easily be made at the microscopic level.