a minipost
First a short video
You can make this yourself. You'll need a chilly day and a cold surface. I had success as a teenager in Montana with outdoor temperatures ranging from -25°C up to about -10°C. Colder worked but the effect wasn't as dramatic and warmer just didn't work. Some of you are in areas that are still seeing chilly weather. You could probably do it in a very cold home freezer if you opened it slowly enough that the warm room air didn't mix in very much. Use a drinking straw to blow bubbles from a soap mixture onto a cold surface. Then watch in amazement. Some of the best views I had were at night using a light to illuminate just the area around the bubble. Children's soap bubble soap works, but I've found better and you might experiment My favorite recipe created a bit stronger bubble:
200g water
35g corn syrup
35g dish soap
25g white sugar
Stir and set aside for awhile so the turbulence from stirring settles down. The corn syrup makes a more robust bubble. The sugar was based on a hunch that it would create nucleation sites.
Here's a piece on some people who looked into the underlying physics. My basic toy model back then that was sort of on the right track but missed a central insight and lacked the experimental analysis. Physics gives tools to understand a variety of phenomena. The underlying physics is very well understood, but much of what happens around us isn't deeply understood as it hasn't been studied or the math is just too difficult. Sand, for example, is extremely difficult at the fundamental level.
Bubbles have had an important role in physics. Newton was fascinated by their formation and optical properties. Faraday (one of the three great scientific minds of the 19th century and the last physicist who didn't use sophisticated mathematics) used bubbles in a creative measurement that a led him to develop the idea of field theory - something that James Clerk Maxwell (one of the other great 19th century scientists) used to explain one of the four fundamental forces. Fields are central to fundamental physics. They were also part of particle physics experiments for about thirty years in the form of some of the most sophisticated and exotic photographic cameras ever made - including an early test that used beer.
Probably things I should write about down the road, but for now try to freeze some bubbles if you have the opportunity!
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