  A liquid drop impacting a dry solid surface with sufficient kinetic energy
will splash, breaking apart into numerous secondary droplets. This phenomenon
shows many similarities to forced wetting, including the entrainment of air at
the contact line. Because of these similarities and the fact that forced
wetting has been shown to depend on the wetting properties of the surface,
existing theories predict splashing to depend on wetting properties as well.
However, using high-speed interference imaging we observe that at high
capillary numbers wetting properties have no effect on splashing for various
liquid-surface combinations. Additionally, by fully resolving the Navier-Stokes
equations at length and time scales inaccessible to experiments, we find that
the shape and motion of the air-liquid interface at the contact line at the
edge of the droplet are independent of wettability. We use these findings to
evaluate existing theories and to compare splashing with forced wetting.
