Pictures show soap bubble bursting

AI Thread Summary
The discussion centers around super slow-motion photography of a soap bubble bursting, highlighting the impressive detail captured in the images. Participants note the interesting phenomenon of droplets forming organized striations as the bubble's "skin" breaks, rather than appearing randomly. There is a comparison to previous work by the Time Warped team, which showcased additional details, including fast-moving droplets. Concerns are raised about whether some observed effects might be artifacts of shutter speed. The conversation also touches on potential applications of this study in fields like biology and cosmology, suggesting that analyzing the striation patterns could lead to innovative insights. Historical references to similar photography by Harold Edgerton are also mentioned, emphasizing the long-standing interest in this visual phenomenon.
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Eh, the Time Warped guys did it better. Check out the segment starting at 3:55.
 
They were both interesting, Richard's showed the very interesting "slivers" that the water breaks into, which you can't see in the movie.
 
I'm not convinced that those aren't simply an artifact of the relatively slow shutter speed (good SLRs can get down below 1/8000th s easily) . My hunch is that those are actually fast-moving and roughly spherical droplets
 
MM...good point :)
 
What IS interesting about the stills upon a closer examination is that you can clearly see the droplets formed as the bubble's "skin" breaks apart are organized into well-defined striations rather than, as one might expect, distributed more or less randomly.
 
negitron said:
What IS interesting about the stills upon a closer examination is that you can clearly see the droplets formed as the bubble's "skin" breaks apart are organized into well-defined striations rather than, as one might expect, distributed more or less randomly.

Now if you can imagine analyzing that striation pattern and using it to form an inverse reconstruction of the fingerprint of the person who popped the balloon, you're on the level with modern cosmologists.
 
Hadn't Harold Edgerton photographed such phenomena decades ago? (I also wonder whether there are any biological applications to this study in surface tension.)
 

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