It’s true, I love bubbles. Who doesn’t? Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles! They are perfect little spheres with a very limited amount of time in this world. From a childhood spent blowing bubbles outside and seeing them soar up high above me, to sending bubbles into a blowing fan for my cats to chase around (I know…shocking…I am a cat person), to watching bubbles dance around the surface of the lake on which we are canoeing, to engineering fluorescent bubbles in the lab with the help of Dana to photograph; bubbles have always been a thing to behold for me. I do not know if it is the impermanence of them, the spectrum of colour dancing around the surface of them, or the light-headed feeling that one gets when one has spent a few minutes blowing through that plastic circle thingy (that is the technical term, I hope it didn’t confuse you) but they fill me with as much joy as a run-on sentence.
When we made our fluorescein and luminol bubbles in the lab, we ended up with coloured spots all over our glasses, lab coats, and faces that glowed in the UV light. These fluorescent bubbles showed us the channels that run between groups of bubbles, how the fluids moved around the surface of these orbs, and they were just plain cool. Who wouldn’t like to play with glowing bubbles?
When you blow a bubble, you see physics at work. Bubbles are a perfect example of surface tension, light, elasticity, and even geometry. A soap bubble is a thin film of soapy water filled with air. This film has three layers; a thin layer of water that is sandwiched between two layers of soap molecules. No matter what shape you blow a bubble, it will always revert to a sphere because a sphere takes the least amount of energy to be and has the least surface area for a given volume of air. When two bubbles merge, they will adopt a shape that once again makes the sum of their surface areas as small as possible. If the two bubbles are the same size, the connecting wall will be flat. If they are of differing sizes, the shared wall will bulge into the larger bubble. This is due to the fact the smaller bubble has a higher internal pressure than the larger one.
Bubbles will burst when the water in them evaporates or if they come into contact with anything that is dry. Bubbles do not like dry; bubbles rarely spend their holidays in Arizona. Evaporation can be slowed down with the addition of either glycerin or sugar to the soap solution and makes them much tastier. (Please don’t eat the soap solution unless belching bubbles is your ultimate goal!) You can even freeze soap bubbles in temperatures under -10 degrees Celsius although they remain fairly small and will collapse in upon themselves fairly quickly. I have tried freezing bubbles to take shots of the crystallization of the water but have never been successful. After spending an hour blowing the solution through that thingy mentioned above, I gave up once I regained consciousness.
The act of blowing a soap bubble is one of trial and error. There we go, oops, it broke again, yay, oh, that one broke too, dag nabbit! oops, oops, YAY, look at that one! It can be an emotional roller coaster ride blowing bubbles. Maybe that is why kids love them so much. Maybe that’s why I love them so much. The humble bubble is not so humble and deserves our respect and adoration.
–Janice Willson
Blowing bubbles in the dark.
The “Humble Bubble” indeed.
love it, very fun and whimsical to read