forever a crush of mine
Oh my god, I love this so hard. (Click the link if you need a bigger version!)
Photodicted
(Source: trollexa)
snowce: To Live at All Is Miracle Enough by Richard Dawkins
Excerpt from Chapter I, “The Anaesthetic of Familiarity,” of his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow
To live at all is miracle enough.
— Mervyn Peake,
The Glassblower (1950)
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to…
(Source: tamburina)
“ But tomorrow I’ll be a different person, never again the person I was. … When dawn comes, the person I am won’t be here anymore. Someone else will occupy this body. ”
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (via frenchtwist)
The science behind bubbles
Bubbles are just one of those things that we find fascinating, they float, they’re colourful and are incredibly satisfying when popped. The science behind them is both interesting and quite relevant to many other aspects of science.
Bubbles work best when water is mixed with soap, but why is this? What soap does is it actually reduces the surface tension of the water, despite what is commonly thought. Soap in this case is more scientifically known as a surfactant and not only reduces over all surface tension but also acts to equalize the forces around the bubble. Soap stabilizes the bubble because as the film of soapy water is stretched the localized concentration of soap actually decreases, increasing the surface tension and pulling the points back together. The spherical shape is due to the bubble wanting to have the lowest possible surface area to volume ratio.An interesting mathematical property of bubbles is that when merging you can only get 3 bubbles to meet along lines that are 120 degrees apart and will also work to adopt the smallest possible surface area. When getting four bubbles to meet they’ll only meet at a point and take on a shape where they’re 109.5 degrees apart, the same angle adopted by tetrahedral molecules. When a large bubble and smaller bubble share a wall, the smaller bubble will also bulge into the larger bubble due to higher internal pressure in the smaller bubble.
The other fascinating thing about soap bubbles is the spectrum of colours they display. This is caused by both the random varying thickness of parts of the bubble and also by the way light passes through the bubble. Most light bounces straight off the bubble, but some passes through the film and then either passes through the other side or bounces off refracting as it goes. Light waves may bounce around inside the bubble indefinitely and this along with interactions with other light waves gives the rainbow effect.
(Source: 14-billion-years-later)
