Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them by C.V. Boys, Doubleday Anchor, 1959
This had best be done in a place where a mess is of no consequence.
Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them by C.V. Boys, Doubleday Anchor, 1959 When you make a fountain play from a jet which you hold as still as possible, there are still accidental tremors of all kinds, which impress upon the issuing cylinder slightly narrow and wide places at irregular distances, and so the cylinder breaks up irregularly into drops of different sizes and at different distances apart. Now these drops, as they are in the act of separating from one another, and are drawing out the waist, as you have seen, are being pulled for the moment towards one another by the elasticity of the skin of the waist; and, as they are free in the air to move as they will, this will cause the hinder one to hurry on, and the more forward one to lag behind, so that unless they are all exactly alike both in size and distance apart they will many of them bounce together before long. You would expect when they hit one another afterwards that they would join, but I shall be able to show you in a moment that they do not; they act like two india-rubber balls, and bounce away again.
Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them by C.V. Boys, Doubleday Anchor, 1959 A spider makes a whole web in an hour, and generally has to make a new one every day. She would not be able to go round and stick all these [beads of a sticky liquid] in place, even if she knew how, because she would not have time. Instead of this she makes use of the way that a liquid cylinder breaks up into beads as follows. She spins a thread, and at the same time wets it with a sticky liquid, which of course is at first a cylinder. This cannot remain a cylinder, but breaks up into beads, as the photograph taken with a microscope from a real web beautifully shows...
Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them by C.V. Boys, Doubleday Anchor, 1959 Prose Poem: One Winter Day
Mary Oliver Today the floes came. They made their stately approach with the incoming tide, in no hurry but as if destined. The tide fell and they were left like dropped clouds along the beach. Little boys clambered onto them, as though they were white ships that could carry them out to sea. The gulls and the eiders also seemed to feel they were here for entertainment, and chose to rest upon this or that shining pinnacle. Those still in water were no more than islands, but when left on shore they revealed themselves entirely, huge, and as gorgeously shaped as sculpture, both inspired and fortunate. A blue light glowed from their crevices. They might have been souls. Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings RIP All this is rather difficult to understand, but as these forms which a soap-bubble takes afford a beautiful example of the most important principle of continuity, I thought it would be a pity to pass it by. It may be put in this way. A series of bubbles may be blown between a pair of rings. If the pressures are different the curves must be different. In blowing them the pressures slowly and continuously change, and so the curves cannot be altogether different in kind. Though they may be different curves, they also must pass slowly and continuously one into the other.
Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them by C.V. Boys, Doubleday Anchor, 1959 |
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