1. Space Bubbles

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You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcast.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

I'm Hannah Frye.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Dara, welcome.

Hannah, it's a delight to be here.

Your first Curious Case.

I know, my first ever activist.

I'm very pleased to have you.

I'm so excited, though.

Do you know what I was really excited about when it came to being part of this show?

Tell me.

Oh, just the hard science.

The big shiny science.

You know, the science that has to be bolted together and takes ages to do, and the numbers are amazing.

Oh, this science, this science took 40 million light bulbs and 6 million

cable ties.

You know, 67 countries are involved in an initiative that will build the world's largest...

And then it probably had to be, you know, put under a lake or, you know, burrowed into a mountain.

You know, that kind of stuff.

Like, what?

Oh, this can only happen by simply lifting the entire thing into space and like big huge hard shiny science or this week bubbles slightly lower tech i would say it is isn't it just like bubbles just just just bubbles we thought we thought you'd ease you gently so this this was a question that came in from a couple of best mates who were chatting at the back of a class and came up with this case for our investigation

Hi, I'm Sophia and I'm Abby.

Well, I saw videos of people online doing tricks where they get people inside a bubble and I was thinking about like how big of a bubble could you make in theory and what would it have to be made out of to be able to make a really big bubble.

Abby and I sit together in most lessons and she told me about this idea and I was well my family's very into saving the planet so I was like what if you could get the earth into the bubble and therefore create like whether you could use that to combat climate change.

But how could we get it that big without it popping?

Okay so there is big stuff in here here then.

How do you make the biggest bubble?

And I mean, why not?

You could make a planet-sized bubble to save us from climate change.

Why not?

Okay, I see how the show works now.

That's a good question.

Yeah, I mean, I can see some technical challenges here.

Yeah, okay, fine.

Go ahead.

Are you a fluid mechanics person?

Do you know what I have a PhD in it?

Wow.

And not in bubbles, though.

In droplets.

Oh, yeah, but surely this is a bit like, you know, you go to a doctor and you go, yeah, but you did, you did feed at some stage.

You know, that'd be important if we did bubbles as part of it.

You know fluids that are enwrapped in surface tension, yes, I do.

Yes, I do, but they're a different, uh, you know, a different phase.

Okay, all right, yeah.

But you know, I think, um, yeah, I've dabbled in bubbles before.

I've I can write you an equation, okay, which is more than I can do.

I have to say more than I can do, but mainly if I can dedicate this episode, do we do that?

Do we dedicate episodes?

You, co-host, you can do whatever you download.

Okay, fine, right, okay.

Um, I want to dedicate it to the parents, um, of my middle son's class who, along with me, when homeschooling began on whatever that day was in 2020, when the school said, Right, we're going to be okay, we'll send you the schedule, but no accompanying material.

We'll just send you the schedule, and then you can mimic the day at home, right?

Okay, uh, so we're sitting in the house and we clicked on it.

And the very first day, and I have asked the other parents this, we all remember this vividly.

The very first day said 9:30 to 11 a.m.

bubbles,

and it was part of a science.

No other information.

No other information offered.

And so we all had to

riff a 90-minute science lesson about bubbles with an eight-year-old beside us.

And just the, it was like, it was science.

Colon, bubbles.

You and one child, that was done.

Couldn't sustain five minutes of that.

Take me back to school.

Yeah.

I can imagine what the chant.

Well, okay, I'm going to give you some exposure therapy, basically, for your bubble-related traumas,

your history of that.

I'm going to give you essentially material if ever you find yourself in this situation again,

because I am going to hit you with a giant bubble straight away.

Because we managed to track down the Guinness World Record Holder for the biggest ever bubble.

And

I'll tell you what, I'm going to let you hear from the man himself.

Well, my name's Gary Perlman.

They call me Dr.

Awesome.

I'm a professional bubbleologist.

The records I hold right now is the tallest free-floating soap bubble and the tallest supported soap bubble.

Then another one that I did is the largest outdoor free-floating soap bubble.

And it was a bit windy that day.

And the poles that I used were fishing poles, but they were mega-sized, like 20-22 feet.

So I had this huge monster lasso rope that I put on to dip.

And for some reason Mother Nature and the wind gods were in my favor and I blew the bubble and I've held that record since 2015.

It was calculated by one of the directors here from NASA Glenn Space Center that's stationed here in Cleveland, Ohio and with a blast of wind that I had that bubble ended up being 3,399.7 cubic feet or 96.27 meters.

The guy actually took a day off from his job at NASA Glenn Space Center and came down to the field where I was doing it at six o'clock in the morning to come watch me blow a bubble.

That's Gary Perlman, who, as he says himself, they call me Dr.

Awesome.

They don't they call you.

I think you've very much forced the name on people, Dr.

Awesome.

At least we now know if something goes wrong in the next NASA space mission, it's because this guy was taking a day off measuring bubbles.

It was when he used the word NASA that I think we all went, oh, hello.

I wasn't expecting NASA to hear at any stage during this endeavor.

But yeah, 96.27 meters.

Oh, it's big.

That is,

yeah.

Do you reckon his doctorate in bubblology is legit?

No, it's

from the legit University of Bubbology.

Bubble Town.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, he knows who he's talking about.

As do our guests, I have to say.

Indeed, they do.

These two who really are the real deal.

Yeah.

Because we have got Dr.

Helenchewski, an oceanographer and physicist at UCL, who is famous for her love of bubbles.

And I would like to point out that bubble physicist is a real job.

I note your scepticism here, but this is a real job.

How about bubbling just?

It's a different form of a real job.

Our other guest is Justin Berkney, a physicist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Justin, you wrote a paper that caught our eye.

In the Physical Review of Fluids, you went with How to Make a Giant Bubble, am I right?

Yes, that's right.

By the way, how did you get into this?

What drew you to bubbles, Justin?

Yeah, well, I mean, I've been studying drops and bubbles ever since I was a PhD student back in the early 2000s in California and generally interested in fluid mechanics that involve surface tension.

I used to study how droplets break apart.

And then I also studied bubbles in the same way and earned the nickname Dr.

Bubbles.

So maybe not Dr.

Awesome, but Dr.

Bubbles.

A lot of titles.

Titles have been thrown around in this field.

Yeah.

So, help us out.

What's the shortcut?

You know, you just add a little soap and water together and you can make a bubble pretty easily.

But it turns out to make the kind of bubbles that Gary was talking about, you need something special.

Okay, and I'm presuming it's a materials question, basically, this.

You have to get away from just a bit of washing up liquid and water.

That's right, that's right.

For the work we published, we tested a few different recipes and kind of teased apart all the basic ingredients for making the world's biggest bubble.

So what's the secret?

At the basic level, what's actually happening there?

Well, for any bubble to last a reasonable amount of time, you need something called a surfactant molecule.

In the case of a soap bubble, we add it to there.

These are molecules where one side likes to be in the air and then one side likes to be in the water and they really stabilize this thin liquid film and make it last for a really long time.

So that's the basic ingredients.

But then the real secret is this stuff called guar gum,

which is a seed that's grown in India, but you can then grind it up and make a powder out of it and soak it in water.

And the polysaccharides form these long chain polymers after you soak them in water for a bit.

And you don't need much, just need a spoonful, a couple of grams per liter, and you'll turn your soap bubble mix into this kind of soupy, stretchy

liquid that when you try to pull a soap film, it is able to

stretch ridiculously fast without breaking.

That's really the secret.

Does the gloopy stuff, the long polymers, are they helping the water to make a bubble or is the water helping them to make a bubble?

Whose surface tension is it a combination of the two?

Where the polymers come in, think of them as like chains with hooks on them or like Christmas lights or something.

You know, you try to pull them apart really quickly and they start to stretch out and they resist that stretching and they can also entangle with each other.

And then they create this kind of entangled network of molecules that help keep this liquid film stable and resist.

You can even like poke your finger through it and not break the soap bubble.

It's really amazing how much stability these things give it.

How big are we talking?

How big can your bubbles get with this recipe?

I would say the biggest one we've ever made, we could put, you know,

we put my son and a dog inside of a bubble that we made in front of my house.

How are they getting on?

Are they okay?

Yeah, it took a while.

We had to call the fire department to get them out.

The bubble was so resistant to breaking.

By the way, just for context, so your biggest bubble fits a boy and a dog inside it.

Dr.

Awesome's, just to picture it,

roughly the size of a double-decker bus.

So we have actually had mixed up some of

Justin's recipe.

Really?

Bubble juice.

Okay.

Can we stop calling it that?

It's a mixture is the word.

It's mixture.

Bubble mixture.

It's in the script.

I'm reading it.

All right.

That's the end of it.

And are we going to have a go?

Why not?

Do we have a small child and a dog?

No, unfortunately.

Okay.

No double deck of bubble juice.

That's the unit by which we're measuring this, is a small child and a dog.

But yes.

Right.

So this is a recipe.

This is, according to Justin's research, this is gua gum dissolved in rubbing alcohol, a bit of baking soda.

Yep.

And, you know, just a little bit of washing up liquid in there for good measure.

And water.

And water, of course.

Water being the most important thing.

So I have to point out that I'm looking through the window at the face of the radio engineer to see what he's going to do when these bubbles drift across the studio on the expensive electronics.

That is a small wand.

It's a tiny wand.

You know what?

That is a good bubble, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're very colourful.

I would say it is a quarter of the size of your head.

Yeah, no, no, no.

I wasn't going for size of the head.

This is my new wand.

It still hasn't popped.

It hasn't.

It's still a little bit of a poppy.

Yeah, Which is just a measure of how the water is being held inside.

So it's not draining very quickly.

Those are the two things that stop it.

If the water evaporates or if it just drains down to the bottom.

So bubbles like this tend to pop at the top because it drains away and then the two sides pop at the top.

Unfortunately, because this is radio, you couldn't see how perfectly on cue that bubble pops

just as you said, which was amazing.

Let me ask you some questions about the physics of this, then, Helen.

While Dara plays with his bubbles over there.

He's actually, you know, you were making fun before, but you're looking like a happy small child now making bubbles.

Thubbles are great fun.

They're just a fun thing.

And we can pretend like,

tell me about the, yeah, boom, tell me about the science.

I'm just going to be sitting here doing this.

Just playing with bubbles.

That's literally what I'm doing.

Go on.

All right, surface tension is the secret here.

Yes.

Why is it only on the surface?

So, well, the thing about a bubble is it's a pocket of gas enclosed in a liquid.

And so you need a gas and a liquid, but if you just have those two things, they're not very good.

And the reason is that the surface tension of water, this tendency to be elastic, is so powerful that it will pull itself inwards really quickly and basically pop anything.

So you need to stop the surface doing that.

So that's why you need these surfactant molecules that will sit at the surface and stop it.

stop it trying to move so violently basically and then the polymers you know they make it more viscous they make it harder for it to drain he's still playing with his bubbles

um and so yeah so basically the behaviour of bubbles is all about the surface because that's the critical interface between the liquid and the gas, and that's what determines what happens next.

That act of the water pulling itself inwards, that's the thing that makes it spherical.

Yes, that's right.

So, a sphere is that

if you've got a fixed amount of film, that's the way to minimise the surface area.

But if you if you can, you don't have to make soap bubbles that are spherical.

You can, people have done these wonderful things where they dip in kind of wire frames that are all kind of strange shapes, and you dip them in, and the soap film,

it has to touch all the edges, but the shape you get in between can be quite striking and in fact there was an architect in the 1970s called Frey Otto who designed buildings based on this principle so the stadium the Munich Olympic Stadium the way he designed it was he held wire frames he put them in bubble solution lifted them out and you know if if there's a sort of three-dimensional structure the bubble films kind of they sort of curve in weird ways well he designed a stadium based on that minimal surface thing and so bubbles have been actually really interesting because it's solving a maths problem that film is solving you know, how to minimize the surface area.

And before they could calculate that, they could just get some bubbles to do it.

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So a lot of the fragility of bubbles seems to be about the water running down out of it and making the film so thin that eventually it breaks.

So let's do this where the water isn't going to run down.

If we go to a zero gravity situation, what happens to bubbles there?

Well, think of all the very serious things NASA has to do on the International Space Station but it turns out bubbles have made it to the top of the list on at least one occasion and they've done quite a lot of experiments on bubbles in zero gravity to see what happens and the first thing is that you can blow bubbles you know it works in the same way but but they don't have to be as thin so so bubbles on earth drain very quickly they they they tend to be very thin you can see that one is kind of dripping liquid off the bottom of it um but in space they don't there's no reason for them to get thinner right right?

They're not, nothing is falling down.

So the liquid layer can actually be thicker.

And there was an astronaut called Naoko Yamazaki who had a young daughter when she went to the space station.

The daughter said, why do we not have coloured bubbles?

And so she took some red food dye with her and she blew bubbles that were red.

And they were red because because nothing's falling down, they could be thicker.

And so you could see the red food dye.

So the reason that if you put coloured food dye in one of these bubbles, a soap bubble, the reason you can't see any colour is because it's just too thin.

It's so thin there's almost nothing there.

There's almost no dye in there.

So you can't see the colour.

But if you make it a bit thicker, like Naraki had, could on the International Space Station, then

there's enough liquid in there to actually see the dye, and then you can blow bubbles that are any colour you like.

And that will stick around for a bit longer.

Stay.

Yeah, for sure.

Until they full stop.

Yeah, well, there's nowhere for them to go.

I mean, unless they evaporate or someone bumps into them,

they just kind of sit there.

So, yeah.

It's very funny watching the astronauts do this.

So, there's video of astronauts playing with this, and you think of all the very serious things astronauts have to do.

They are giggling like small children while they're playing with these bubbles.

Much like us.

Yeah, taking for the last five minutes just making giant bubbles over here, half listening to what you're saying.

So, very interesting.

But the question then is: if you're in space in zero gravity, what if you're outside of a warmed environment, if you're just out in space?

Could you do that in the vacuum of space?

Could you blow a bubble?

It wouldn't last very long.

Gas just disappears.

Things evaporate.

There's nothing to stop it.

There's no humidity.

There's nothing sort of bouncing on it to keep it in.

And so it would evaporate incredibly quickly.

So a soap film in the vacuum of space basically wouldn't survive.

Okay, this doesn't sound good for their grand idea of enveloping the earth.

But just hold on to your horse.

You might be able to freeze that bubble, though, too.

Well, you might be able to freeze the bubble, says Justin.

You know what?

I've actually, I've got a little bit of...

A little bit of science to bring to the table here.

Okay, so so far we've learned bubbles on the Earth.

It's all about surface tension.

If you want to get a really big bubble, you've got to get your bubble juice right to get the polymers in the right way.

And that bubbles in space are possible, even if they won't hang around for very long.

But, okay, I want to take this to the next level because

we did also discover a

frankly absurd project by actual scientists based at MIT in the US.

And they are exploring whether or not you could set up a massive raft of bubbles in space to to reflect sunlight.

Sort of a large ditch resort

to save us from climate change.

Here is Professor Carlo Ratti who is leading the MIT, MIT people, project that is literally called Space Bubbles.

When I talk to my colleagues, well, everybody's concerned about the temperatures we've been seeing over the past 12 to 18 months.

So there's a growing concern.

Clearly, we need to work on the planet on mitigation and adaptation.

But do we have a plan B?

Well, the only plan B we might have is actually to reflect a small percentage of the sunlight incoming on the planet, say one, two or three percent, and by doing so we can actually cool down the Earth.

Think about something like an umbrella, more or less the size of Brazil, to be placed in between the Earth and the Sun.

In order to do that you need to think about how to ship a lot of material outside the planet.

You need to think about how to fabricate in space.

And also you need to think about a system that's dynamic enough so you can control it, change it, adapt it and eventually remove it.

Clearly what you want to do is have the maximum surface with a minimum thickness.

And well the beautiful thing about bubbles you get is very very thin surface just a few molecules thick.

The second thing you can fabricate in space more easily and the third thing you can actually put them together and create 3D arrays that then you can actuate, move and control.

This is only a last resort.

Again, we should fix our problems here on the planet, but still, it would be important to have a plan B.

Who knew that plan B stood for bubbles?

A Brazil-sized umbrella.

What do you reckon, Dara?

I love the idea just as an idea.

I think it's amazing because it would be, you know, you have to fly it out into space.

You create a bubble bubble bubble.

Like, I mean, I'm presuming you could make a fairly thick bubble in this situation, obviously, and that might be the one thing that would.

But

no, I'm feeling a no coming from you here in Delhi.

And just, you know, the bit of the many things that made me raise an eyebrow in this, the one that got the, it was, it's the bit about it being the size of Brazil.

I mean, that's quite big.

And so the effort it required to put all that up there and to launch it and then to maintain it.

What happens if a little meteorite comes along and just like nudges it, you know, hits it and just...

pushes it off course somewhere and it just drifts off to the wrong place and starts shading Mars instead?

I mean, that's no good.

Well, I think, Mars, we're not going to get any angry letters from Mars saying that you've taken our sunlight away.

I presume the idea is the place you'd have to be was what's known as the Lagrange point, which is the point of space where the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Earth is the same.

So you can stick something there and it'll stay there.

I suppose the idea is that the Brazil thing would shield Earth entirely, but take a little bit of the sunlight off us.

So, yeah, I mean, the problem with climate change is the problem of Earth accumulating extra energy.

So you can say that, well, if you stop some energy coming in, then maybe that helps solve the problem.

It doesn't solve the problems of, you know, ocean acidification and air pollution and all of those things but it might stop the energy problem if you didn't take so much energy to do it that it counteracted anything it did details details

where's the optimism justin back me up on this well he's right that uh this would be the ideal way to do it so maybe you know you go to a party and somebody has one of those foam machines that's just pushing out uh you know kind of a foam of bubbles that you know people like to run around in and play and stuff like that.

And that looks white and that looks white because there's so many bubbles that when the light comes in there, it scatters in all different directions.

But it doesn't take that much liquid or whatever liquid they plan on using for this to make it.

So I can imagine a bubble machine sitting out there in space constantly pupping out this foam until it's the size of Brazil.

I don't think it's impossible.

You certainly get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of

reflecting light and having the least amount of material possible.

Yeah, you're talking about a silicon polymer here.

You're talking about a very, very, very, very, very small amount of gas because you've got the vacuum of space, as you mentioned, Helen.

And the idea is that these things, they just freeze.

You know, it's a bit like when you go in your garden in the dead of winter and you blow bubbles and they freeze.

Just like that, but just in space.

I've got this mental picture of the clangers blowing bubbles.

And it makes me happy.

I'll give you that.

I just mental a picture of the bit where

an umbrella in the shape of Brazil lines up over Brazil and and the people of Brazil go whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa why why did we lose out here why why did you do it this way you know the yeah that feels that feels unfair oh was that was that not part of the plan originally I just need to sign up for this like whatever it's grand okay so we get an umbrella the same okay fine cool yeah

people have been talking about this idea for a long time you know putting something in front of the earth to divert some of the sunlight think of a giant lens or something like that but this bubble idea I think actually

could possibly work well there is I mean there is a serious point about why why why bubbles would be an interesting structure for this and it's because bubbles are interesting because they're a liquid and a gas not mixing but together they can do things that neither one of those things can do so you know for example if you if you have a latte and you know it's got foam on top you can balance a spoon you can sort of put a spoon flat on it and it will support the weight but the the gas doesn't do that.

If you put a spoon in mid-air, it just falls through the gas.

And if you put a spoon on top of water, it would just fall through the water.

But if you mix the liquid and the gas together in the right form, you do have something which will take the weight of a spoon.

And so bubbles do form these very lightweight structures.

Even and foam like that is very useful in all sorts of places.

So

that's the serious thing.

A very, very small amount of material.

And presumably something that you could undo quite quickly if you decided that actually you were deflecting light in the wrong direction.

With a big pin.

With a big pin.

No, now we've got to fly a pin to the Lagrange point.

Now we've got to build a second robot.

If I thought we could call up NASA and get them to help, but unfortunately they're too busy measuring double-decker bus size bubbles on us.

I just feel there's a lot of unforeseen consequences that we haven't thought through here.

And then we have a second round of fundraising for Earth's Saviour 2, which is just a pin that we fly up and the pin pops all the bubbles.

But yeah, but still, look, I like it.

I like it as a, and it's also, I'd imagine also the closest we're going to get to can we build, because we're not going to be able to build one single giant bubble over us.

That's absurd.

That's absolutely ridiculous.

But lots of bubbles at, you know, way off into space could be the thing.

You look at you, you're old.

I've come around to it.

Actually, because

I expected to be in with you guys on this, but actually, you've now, you're all like going, no, no, that's actually probably right.

That could probably work.

So, yeah, let's go for it.

Okay, enough of space

and science fiction.

Coming down to Earth, though, for a moment, Helen, you research bubbles in the ocean, which is a different kind of bubble.

And isn't true that these bubbles already have a massive and kind of underappreciated impact on our climate?

They do, yeah.

So, so underwater bubbles, they're the really fun bubbles because they do all kinds of interesting, like they're a lot more dynamic, basically.

And so, it is the case that, you know, the ocean is massive and the atmosphere is massive.

And the layer between them, the ocean surface, that's where you get breaking waves.

Breaking waves make bubbles.

And bubbles are like little packets of the atmosphere pushed down into the ocean.

So, they actually help the ocean breathe in.

So, if you get a really big storm at sea, which is the kind of thing I study, you know, you're out in a big ship and there's these enormous waves around you,

big breaking waves, you can see the bubble plumes underwater.

And what you can also see is that all of that is pushing gas underwater, extra gas.

And the two gases that matter are carbon dioxide and oxygen that get moved, the bubbles speed up the transfer of those gases into the ocean.

Now it depends where on the planet you are.

So near the equator, the ocean tends to be breathing out carbon dioxide.

And then the North Atlantic, for example, it tends to be breathing in.

But are those bubbles not constantly trying to rise upwards through the water?

Yeah, but even so, I mean, they're still underwater for long enough to push that gas into the water.

And you can see this, right?

So just over Christmas, I was out in the Labrador Sea in the

northwest corner of the North Atlantic, big stormy seas.

And I had oxygen sensors that were just half a metre and less than half a meter above below the surface, right?

So right up at the top.

And every time you get a breaking wave, you get a stonking great big spike in oxygen because those bubbles are pushing oxygen into the ocean.

And if that water then moves downwards, then you're moving that gas deeper into the ocean.

And the only way all those weird deep ocean creatures with kind of like, you know, lights, little fishing rods with lights on coming out of their heads, they breathe oxygen.

And the place that oxygen comes from is the surface.

And it turns out that the way oxygen goes down, it seems to happen during the very stormy periods.

And it seems that bubbles are making a difference.

Is that part of the reason why the oceans are carbon sink?

I mean, because there's carbon dioxide in those bubbles too, right?

Yes.

You know, the ocean has taken up around 30% of the carbon dioxide that we've put into the atmosphere, the extra.

And the question is, will it continue to do that?

And that's why studying the bubbles is important.

It's quite interesting then that all of this fancy pant sci-fi

turns out bubbles are already helping with climate change.

That's certainly what I'm taking away from it.

So it remains then to thank both of our guests, Justin Besson and Helichewski.

Thank you very much for joining us.

So my friend, how's that?

Bubble trauma?

If I'd known all this at the start of lockdown, I could have made the

it would be the best bubble lesson ever.

You'd barely have had time to blow any bubbles.

Yeah, I've been there going, Oh, time's up.

And they're going, No, no, father, please, which is the way they address me.

Father, please, tell me more about the bubbles.

Well, then, in terms of our questionnaire, then

we've got the answer for you there.

Yeah, Abby wanted to know how you make it, guar gum, G-U-A-R gum, or any gloopy thing added to the soap will work.

And if you want to save the planet from climate change by using bubbles in space, you can, just not in the way you are thinking at all.

Not one big one, but loads of little ones.

Yeah.

And also, maybe don't do that for fear of unintended consequences.

Who knows?

People in Brazil might hope they're with you.

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