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The humble simplicity of a soap bubble disguises a huge range of scientific phenomena ranging across the fields of chemistry, physics and pure mathematics. The same principles that give soap bubbles their shape and stability have applications in architecture and cellular biology.
Surface chemists have studied how soaps and detergents work to clean and how they affect the intermolecular forces between water molecules (visible macroscopically as surface tension) to allow soap films and bubbles to form.
The exploring the shape and behavior of soap films and bubbles under the influence of these molecular forces leads to some interesting physics. For example the waves and oscillations in flat soap films or round bubbles.
The reflection of light off bubbles or soap films also reveals some interesting physics, the coloured interference resulting from the reflection off the thin film tells us how thin the film is and gives bubbles their beautiful colours. Using this phenomenon to look at the flow within a soap film, we can re-examine some areas of fluid dynamics (such as turbulence or convection) in a simpler, two dimensional system.
Bubbles are even of interest to pure and applied mathematicians who study the shapes of the surfaces that bubble films take, either as a free surface or when joined together. One of the great unsolved problems of mathematics is Plateau's problem of finding the surface of minimum area that a free soap film will take for a general given boundary.
Much is understood about the science of bubbles but there is still live research happening in all these fields.
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