Bubble Art

Apex Researcher Microscope 40x, Brightfield, Rheinberg Filter.

Bubbles are fascinating. These photos are all of air bubbles in water to which a drop of washing up liquid has been added. My method is simple: I just put a small amount of tap water on a watch glass. Add one drop of washing up liquid and use a pipette to blow air back and forth through the mixture until a good load of bubbles have formed of all different sizes. I put the watch glass on a microscope slide and place that on the microscope stage. It is then easy to move the watch glass using the stage movement controls. I use the microscope's lamp as normal as the light source and place Rheinberg filters (which are basically circular pieces of transparent coloured plastic) of various colour combinations for the coloring effects, above it.

Meiji EMT microscope 60x, Brightfield illumination with Rheinberg Filter.

 You can learn a lot of physics from studying bubbles. In fact there are scientists at Cambridge  and other Universities who study them for a living! The science can then be applied to many other problems. Here is a video explaining why bubbles are the shape they are. and another hour long documentary called "Pop!" about you guessed it - Bubbles!!! Basically bubbles are spherical because that is the lowest energy configuration and gives the largest enclosed volume for the smallest surface area but interesting things happen when bubbles join... see the above videos.