Solid angle is much, much farther away. The solid angle subtended by the complete ()-dimensional spherical surface of the unit sphere in -dimensional Euclidean space can be defined in any number of dimensions . One often needs this solid angle factor in calculations with spherical symmetry. It is given by the formula where is the gamma function. When is an integer, the gamma function can be computed explicitly. It follows that This gives the expected results of 4 steradians for the 3D sphere bounded by a surface of area and 2 radians for the 2D circle bounded by a circumference of length
Capillary surface and that the most stable configuration can become metastable through mechanical jarring without too much difficulty. On the other hand, a metastable surface can sometimes spontaneously achieve lower energy without any input (seemingly at least) given enough time. Boundary conditions for stress balance describe the capillary surface at the contact line: the line where a solid meets the capillary interface; also, volume constraints can serve as boundary conditions (a suspended drop, for example, has no contact line but clearly must admit a unique solution). For static surfaces, the most common contact line boundary condition is the implementation of the contact