Michael Macnaughton

Sciences
November 2015

THE PHYSICS OF BUBBLES

Bubbles are seemingly simple and ordinary but they actually combine some very elegant and
fundamental physical phenomenae. First of all, what stops bubbles from bursting? After all a bubble
is just a fragile droplet of water blown up into a sphere, so why doesnt it just pop? The answer is
surface tension.
Surface tension is a phenomenon that occurs due to a liquids tendency to take up the least
amount of surface area possible and is what causes bubbles to have their spherical shape. This is
true for all bodies of liquid when no external forces are acting on them, including gravity. On the
ISS (International Space Station) the astronauts often showcase tricks of them firing droplets of
water across the station for their colleagues to drink. These droplets are always roughly spherical
as their surface tension pulls them into spherical shapes to minimizes their surface area. This is
know as Laplaces Law.

-Molecule of water
Two molecules of the same elements will always experience forces between them. These intermolecular forces are called the Van Der Waals forces named after Dutch scientist Johannes
Diderik Van Der Waals. As can be seen from the diagram, a molecule of water under the surface
level will experience forces in all directions towards other molecules of water so the net force experienced by the molecule is zero. Its like a tug of war in all directions where each team is equally
strong. However, at the surface of the water, the molecules are not fully surrounded by other
water molecules and so are attracted more strongly to its neighbouring molecules.
This creates surface tension. For water, the surface tension is unusually high as a
result of the strong intermolecular forces occurring due to the hydrogen bonding
present in water. Under normal circumstances on Earth the surface tension in water is actually too high to create bubbles without collapsing but by adding soap to
the water, the surface tension is lowered and longer lasting bubbles can be formed.
It is this phenomenon that also allows those little insects to scurry along the surface
of a pond even though they are denser than the water. It also allows you to fill
your glass of water over the top of the rim without it spilling.

The second more marvelous physical phenomenon in bubbles is the wonderful array of spectral colours that appear on their surfaces. This is due to the interference of light between the inner and outer film of the soap bubble. To understand it we must first look at how light behaves.
As has been proved by quantum physics, light can behave as the familiar wave but also as a stream
of packets of energy called photons. Taking light as a particle, we must apply some fairly fruitcakey laws of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) to work out how this phenomenon works. I may
come back to this area in a future article but for now we will treat light as a definite wave.
The white light from the sun is purely a combination of all the colours visible to the human
eye just as we see them in rainbows. Each different colour of light is defined by a wavelength, the
wavelength being the distance between two crests (the top) of the wave. The colour with the
largest wavelength is red and the shortest is violet. In between are the colours of the rainbow in
just the same order as we see them and together they form the visible spectrum of light.

Now a bubble is a sphere but if we zoomed

into the surface then it would appear to be flat just as the Earth appears flat to us but out in Space
it is clear that it is a sphere. The bubble is also made out of two separated films of soapy water,
an outer and an inner as shown below.

Direction of waves
Outer soap film
Inner soap film
When the white light travels towards the outer soap film, a certain amount goes through but
some reflects off the surface. The light that goes through keeps going until it meets the inner soap
film where once again some of the light goes straight through and some reflects backwards. If we
imagine that we are looking down on the wave and that each line represents the crest of the wave
then it makes it easier to see (and draw on a computer) how the wave acts. So the lines drawn
represent the reflected waves from the inner and outer films of soap.
Remember, white light is composed of a variety of different wavelengths (colours) so each different wavelength is reflected back. For some colours the waves will be out of sync as in the
drawn example as the low point of the wave reflected from the inner film meets the high point of
the wave reflected from the outer film. The result is that they cancel out and that colour is not

seen. This is wave interference and this specific type is called destructive interference. For
other wavelengths of light the high and low points will reinforce
each other when they match up and this is constructive interference. For each different colour the interference will be different and the end result is a splitting up of all the different colours
creating the beautiful light-shows that we see on the surface of
bubbles. The specification of which colours appear where depend
on the thickness of the soap film in different places. Where the
thickness of the soap film is of a whole integer factor of the wavelength of a specific colour then constructive interference will occur but when the thickness is of a half integer factor of the wavelength of a specific colour there will be destructive interference.
Most of the time bubbles are not one uniform thickness and so at different points in the bubble,
different colours will be seen.
There is more that could be discussed on the physics of bubbles but for now I hope I have
shown how, even in something as a familiar as a bubble, there are a whole range of physical laws
that underpin just how it works.
Michael Macnaughton