A raft of soap bubbles remembers its past

Soap Bubbles: Part 1

love soap bubbles. They're beautiful, delicate, and though they live only briefly, it's a glorious moment. They float on the air, brilliant colors wobbling over their surface, and when they pop into nothingness, it's just an opportunity to make more bubbles! This issue and next I'll talk about the chemistry, physics, and computer graphics of soap bubbles. Here I'll focus on the physics of soap ...

When Soap Bubbles Collide

Partial coalescence of soap bubbles

Generating Soap Bubbles by Blowing on Soap Films.

Making soap bubbles by blowing air on a soap film is an enjoyable activity, yet a poorly understood phenomenon. Working either with circular bubble wands or long-lived vertical soap films having an adjustable steady state thickness, we investigate the formation of such bubbles when a gas is blown through a nozzle onto a film. We vary film size, nozzle radius, space between the film and nozzle, ...

How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds

Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of analysis. In many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest are not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor can they be inferred from the properties of the individual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the properties of those individuals may be. In commercia...