This is at least the second time that tap dripping was involved in a scientific study.

The first that I know of is when some Santa Cruz (hippie capital) students set up electronics to record the timing of drips for a paper. They were going to break the pattern down to understand it. They tried and tried but the pattern always seemed random.

With the help of other researchers they discovered it was caused by chaos. This was the first time that chaos theory was described, although Feynman had noticed that some equations behaved weirdly when banging on his calculator.