Photo credit: ScienceMadeFun
What do you get when you combine bubbles with extremely cold weather? Awesome videos of course. Here are a few interesting facts: Soap bubbles blown into air that is below a temperature of −15 °C (5 °F) will freeze when they touch a surface. The air inside will gradually diffuse out, causing the bubble to crumble under its own weight. Continue reading to see more.
5. Outdoors
At temperatures below about −25 °C (−13 °F), bubbles will freeze in the air and may shatter when hitting the ground.
4. Fun
When a bubble is blown with warm air, the bubble will freeze to an almost perfect sphere at first, but when the warm air cools, and a reduction in volume occurs, there will be a partial collapse of the bubble. A bubble, created successfully at this low temperature, will always be rather small; it will freeze quickly and will shatter if increased further.
3. Numbers
Soap bubbles are physical illustrations of the complex mathematical problem of minimal surface. They will assume the shape of least surface area possible containing a given volume.
2. Shattered
While it has been known since 1884 that a spherical soap bubble is the least-area way of enclosing a given volume of air (a theorem of H. A. Schwarz), it was not until 2000 that it was proven that two merged soap bubbles provide the optimum way of enclosing two given volumes of air of different size with the least surface area. This has been dubbed the Double Bubble conjecture.
1. The Big Freeze
A true minimal surface is more properly illustrated by a soap film, which has equal pressure on inside as outside, hence is a surface with zero mean curvature. A soap bubble is a closed soap film: due to the difference in outside and inside pressure, it is a surface of constant mean curvature.
