Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painters like Chardin and Manet had a certain fascination with bubble-blowing physics. Both left behind artwork depicting children blowing soap bubbles through straws. Now researchers are Keep reading
Tag: soap bubbles
Exploding a Bubble
In this high-speed video, artist Linden Gledhill ignites a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen contained within a soap bubble. As neat as the video is, I decided to take a Keep reading
Optimal Bubble Clusters
With a bubble wand, it’s quite easy to create clusters of two or more soap bubbles. These clusters seem to instantly find the lowest energy state, forming a shape that Keep reading
Chilly Soap Films
Evaporation is a well-known effect in soap films and bubbles. It’s responsible for the ever-changing thickness reflected in the film’s many colors. But evaporation does more than change the bubble’s Keep reading
Bending in Bubbles
Inside a cavity with a square cross-section, bubbles form an array. The shapes of their edges are determined by surface tension and capillarity (lower half of center image). Adding an Keep reading
Within the Bubble’s Pop
To our eyes, a soap bubble appears to pop instantly, but when observed in high-speed video, the process is far more complex. In this video, the Slow Mo Guys pop Keep reading
The Best of FYFD 2020
2020 was certainly a strange year, and I confess that I mostly want to congratulate all of us for making it through and then look forward to a better, happier, Keep reading
The Colors of a Thin Film
Soap bubbles and other thin films are colorful thanks to wave interference across their tiny thickness, but you may have noticed that only some colors appear. Others, like red, seem Keep reading
Spinning Bubbles
Fluid dynamics is largely about figuring out the relationship between forces. For a soap bubble sitting still, that’s primarily the effect of gravity, which makes the fluid in the soap film drain downward, and Keep reading
Branching Light with Soap Bubbles
By shining laser light through soap bubbles, researchers have demonstrated branching flow in light for the first time. This branching occurs when waves travel through a disordered medium where the Keep reading