Bubble jump

and although scary, the kids couldnt stop themselves jumping right into the bubbles.... :)

couldnt help but performing a bit more of pubmedsearching, and found this paper in Science from 1969, where the author is describing the size and lifespan of his bubbles; so cool!!! here is a small citation:
"Bubbles, made from solutions A to F (Table 2), were beautifully colored, although rather thick at the beginning. After bubbles made from these solutions had lasted over 200 days, I became interested in blowing larger bubbles. Big bubbles were blown in a Plexiglas box (55.9-cm edge cube) (13), but they did not last more than a week. Then, Corning Glass Works provided first one and later three 72-liter Pyrex flasks (14), the largest spherical flasks produced in this country. They were perfect for my purposes, and many bubbles were blown to a diameter of 40 to 50 cm out of solutions A to F." (for the scientists: also interesting to see that the writing style of a paper is markedly different from nowadays, just from reading this small part its clear, no?)

Some soap

some water, a little glycerol and some secret ingredients. plus good humidity, not too much sun and a little wind; that is necessary to make gigantic soap bubbles. and of course an audience is needed... i am not sure the soap artist thought children were the perfect audience, but defenitely they loved it!! the bubbles were huge, and jumping into them makes them explode and you hair full of soap (which is a little scary; see above), and blowing into them makes smaller bubbles into big bubbles. i think i took 300 pictures -mostly bad ones.. :( . the children got crazy, as soon as another bubble appeared out of the artist's net, they jumped up to destroy it, while he kept saying: leave them, leave them. at least leave them until they are a full bubble!! it was amazing to see... :)

sylvia came over from san diego, she has a meeting in boston starting friday and we took half a day off thursday to go to Lincoln, to the de cordova sculpture park. the museum was closed, but the park was interesting enough (and the bubble man)! now ofcourse we will try to make huge bubbles ourselves too... in fact there are quite some papers on pubmed about soap bubbles; just saw that in june there was a publication in nature that describes what happens to bubbles when they explode; rather than vanishing, this creates small bubbles.... just to let you know...