Joy in art and science of bubbles

Make a so bubble and observe it; you could spend a whole life studying it

— Statement attributed to Sir William Thomson

A soap bubble is the most beautiful thing, and the most exquisite in nature… I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble if there was only one in the world.

— Mark Twain

I’d like to tell you, Mercury, that to me all men and their lives seem alike. Have you ever watched those bubbles that form in the pool of a waterfall? The foam which is made up of bubbles? The tiny ones break and vanish immediately… That’s what man’s life is like.

— From a dialogue between Charon and Mercury: 2nd century, Greece

However true, to use a bubble — with all its fragility, its impermanence — to describe life has turned into a cliché: over time and across cultures. No one is surprised by the usage, the parallelism, any longer; no one is moved. It is simply there, standing for vanitas now, mortality another time. Kshana-bhangur — ‘bursting to disappear in a trice’ — is how life is described repeatedly in Sanskrit literature. Nazar tum zindagi samjhe ho jis ko/faqat paani ka hai ik bulbula woh, a contemporary said in Urdu. Homo Bulla — ‘man is but a bubble’, shouted the great scholar Varro in ancient Rome once.

Against this background, however, I was fascinated when I recently came upon an article, not on bubbles as such, but on soap bubbles. We — my siblings and I — used to make them, those shiny, shimmery, iridescent spheres, in our childhood. It used to be pure fun, with no thoughts bearing down upon us then. But that there are so many aspects to bubbles, or soap bubbles, I had frankly no idea of. Apparently, soap bubbles have been a theme in art, in science, in philosophy, for a very long time. I was a bit startled, thus, by the opening sentence of an article by Angelica Frey: “What do the roof of the Munich Olympic Stadium, Glinda the Good Witch, Disney’s Cinderella, the art series ‘Unweave a Rainbow’ by neo-surrealist painter Ariana Papademetropoulos, Sir Isaac Newton, the first ‘viral’ ad campaign of the late Victorian era, and morose Dutch still-life paintings have in common?” The answer: soap bubbles. Not all the references in this sentence can one decode, but the import is clear.

Soap bubbles in the visual arts? I do not think we see any in Indian painting, but in European art, they began appearing somewhere in the latter part of the 16th century, in Holland in particular. Just possibly the very first time we see them is in a work that Cornelis Ketel painted in 1574. It was on the back of a portrait — Ketel was essentially a portrait painter — and showed a putto, unclothed innocent little boy, out in the open, blowing bubbles from a little dish he holds aloft. The reference clearly was to the impermanence of life, and one can see the painting as belonging to a genre — Vanitas — which earned a fortune for a whole generation of moralising Dutch painters. Painting after painting of soap bubbles being made appeared, often including other meaningful objects: musical instruments to suggest the fading of sound; time-pieces hinting at the passage of time; glass ‘fragile, like human pleasures’; half-burnt candle-sticks. Transience was, in essence, the theme. The motto “Everything I embrace, but nothing I grasp”, seemed to be everywhere.

Technically, or scientifically viewed if one likes, soap bubbles are “extremely thin films of soapy water enclosing air that forms a hollow sphere with an iridescent surface. Iridescence, in this case, means that they change colour depending on the angle you see them from, because of light interference”. Isaac Newton, the great scientist, is known to have watched a child blow soap bubbles and been greatly fascinated. In his work ‘Opticks’, he observed that the colours that one sees on them are reflected rays. This refraction of light led him to develop theories of his own; and as someone wittily said, “Bubbles were to be to optics what apples had allegedly been to gravitation.”

Scientists — to be sure, there has been an enormous amount of writing on the subject as well as experimentation — have crowded the field for a very long period, studying soap bubbles. Mathematically, as has been said — one quotes with apology for there is very little that at least I understand of all this — soap bubbles are examples of the complex mathematical problem of minimal surface area. “This means that given a certain volume, they will always take the shape with the least surface.” Leonardo da Vinci, having observed soap bubbles, wrote about them in his famed diaries with characteristic lucidity. “Water attracts other water to itself when it touches it: this is proved from the bubble formed by a reed with water and soap, because the hole through which the air enters there into the body and enlarges it, immediately closes when the bubble is separated from the reed, running one of the sides of its lip against its opposite side, and joins itself with it and makes it firm.” Clearly, there have been lessons lurking in bubbles and now they have actually been used in mathematical problem-solving — leading to the design of better roofs, for instance. The revolutionary design of the Munich Olympic stadium, built in 1972, is clearly one example that is cited, because that is where these ideas were put into practice. At the experimental level, work goes on. Soap bubbles have been frozen at extremely low temperatures and exhibited. Less than 10 years ago, Professor Eleanor Stride of Oxford was awarded a prestigious prize for working on using microbubbles for targeted drug delivery in cancer patients to avoid side-effects.

While all this is going on, however, one needs to say that fun has not entirely gone out of blowing soap bubbles. Yet. The poet John Keats’ lament on Isaac Newton’s ‘Opticks’ — that his findings were going to “unweave a rainbow”, that they “had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to prismatic colours” — has not been un-heeded. There are now ‘bubbleologists’ around, one of them having become something of a celebrity for having blown the world’s largest free-floating soap bubble recently. There are also Soap Bubble Circuses going around, laying stress on ‘Learning and Laughter’, and proclaiming, rightly, that “few things in the world so perfectly combine art, science, math and joy in the way that soap bubbles do”.