Math in… Soap Bubbles
Soap bubbles minimize their energy states by minimizing their surface area.
A bubble might wobble around for a bit after it leaves your bubble wand...
...but will pretty quickly snap into the shape of a sphere. Why does it do that?
If all of these shapes have the same volume,
the sphere will always have the lowest surface area.
A bubble actually starts trying to minimize its surface area before it even leaves the wand! If the wand is circular, then the surface formed by the attached soap film is a disk. If the wand has another shape, the surface formed might not be flat!
When bubbles form a cluster, you might notice they organize themselves into some arrangements and not others.
A triple bubble cluster tends to form a ring where they all touch each other rather than a three-bubble chain, locally minimizing surface area.
What interesting structures have you seen with bubbles?
