Blowing The World's First Black Bubbles—The Physics of Light Penetration Experiment

Okay, everyone today I'm going to be making black bubbles So in order to do this, I'm going to be using some very special bubbles These bubbles are called long lasting bubbles, and they essentially just last forever. They never pop. It's pretty amazing Let me show you what I mean. Okay, so let's blow some Look how strong these are. Even if you wave it around in the air, they don't pop. So because these bubbles are so ultra strong, what I'm going to try to do is actually paint them black see if I can make black bubbles. And then after that, because I know I'm gonna get a lot of requests, I'm gonna see what happens when I put the bubbles in the vacuum chamber So you can see these bubbles have. When you do pop them, they're kind of sticky. They have they have an actual skin to them So the reason these are able to last so long is because they don't depend on water but a slight polymer film around them So that means you can even touch them but the cool part is is they look just like normal soap bubbles So the bubbles that I blew in my garage here that just landed on the table in the floor They've been here for over five hours and still no change So I assume they'll just stay this way pretty much indefinitely until something pops them normal bubbles Even if they can land like this and not pop as they dry out they get smaller and smaller and smaller But these keep their shape because of this polymer on the outside So first, let's see what this looks like when I try to do it just regular soap bubbles so if I mix some of this black in Let's see if it works So the bubbles work, but it doesn't look that black at all You can see that with regular soap bubbles even though there's black paint in it The membrane is so thin that you can't really see the black color at all. But the key to getting this to work is to get a bubble membrane that is much thicker than the normal water soap membrane. So hopefully this will be thick enough to actually be able to see the black color of the bubble. Okay, so first let's get some of our bubble solution here And then I'm going to be putting some Chef master Cole black food color in it And this is a lot more of an intense color than regular food coloring. It's extremely dark. Let's add some to it Stir it up here So you can see, how black this is now Okay, let's see if this actually works Oh, it broke. It was totally black. Okay, black bubble. Whoa Look at that! A black bubble Look at the black bubble. That's so cool! Totally black. Holy cow, look at that. So cool Look at that one So cool There it goes Surprised that they're actually lasting even when landing on the grass There we go. Did it. There a self-sustained black bubble This is actually pretty interesting. Notice that the bubble solution is extremely black, but when I blow up the bubbles It becomes more transparent So as the membrane got thinner it became more and more transparent. And that's actually true for any material, even metal. Now, in the case of the bubbles the reason that happened is because the pigment that was in the bubble solution was spreading out so there weren't as many pigments per area and so it looked like it was more transparent. more light was getting though. But even if you have a material that's completely homogeneous like metal here For example this aluminum foil. If I was able to spread this out thin enough, would it actually become transparent too? For example, if I was able to pound this down thinner and thinner and thinner Eventually, even though I had a completely intact metal sheet, it would be transparent, completely transparent So when light hits a metal there's an exponential decay of the intensity of light down into the surface of the metal. So if you only have a few layers of atoms and you shine light through it There aren't enough atoms to absorb all of that light. So it attenuates a little bit. It absorbs some of the light, but most of it will just pass through it. But you have to be in a very thin range, around 20 nanometers to a hundred nanometers thick. So around 20 nanometers for mostly any metal it would just be completely transparent. So if I had a thin enough bubble of aluminum or gold, I'd be able to see through that bubble as well. Okay first let's get our long lasting bubbles here. Okay, I think I finally caught enough So I kind of have bubbles all over me after catching these. Let's see what happens in the vacuum chamber. Okay, here we go, okay. Three two one. *air being sucked out of the box* They're expanding and popping So because the bubbles dried a little, so because the bubbles dried already As soon as they started to expand, they just popped like a balloon Okay, so these have held up the entire time, several hours now, and they still haven't popped. So thanks for watching another episode of the action lab. I hope you enjoyed it if you did, remember to hit that subscribe button and hit the bell to be notified with my latest videos out and head over to the Actionlab.com if you haven't checked out the new action lab subscription box Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 819,269

Keywords: black bubbles, black, black 3.0, black 2.0, blackest black, vantablack, world's blackest, the action lab, how to, blackest material, blackest bubbles, colored bubbles, most viewed, space documentary, vacuum chamber, action lab, venus fly trap, hydraulic press, stretch armstrong, foil ball, iron man, vac man, science experiment, cool science, zombie ant, home science, brightest flashlight, 4th dimension, 32000 lumen, self pouring, is water wet, science experiments

Id: VNlm_ksTXr4

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 30 2018