Electric Bubbles

This posting will later be added to the compound posting, "Water Made Really Simple", on the meteorology and biology blog www.markmeeklife.blogspot.com .

Water molecules group together in the process known as hydrogen bonding. This takes place because the water molecule is polar. Because of the balance of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in the molecule, one side of the molecule is more negative and the other side more positive. This causes the molecules to line up, negative to positive.

In Part One, on the meteorology and biology blog www.markmeeklife.blogspot.com , we saw how this strings of molecules hypothesis explains so much of what we see as the properties of liquid water.

Today, let's look at another effect of this concept of water molecules held together by electric charges which explains so much of the properties that we see in liquid water. We can see this string model of water in how bubbles form in liquid water.

If water is flowing from a tap at high speed, and the tap is of the type that emits many separate streams of water so that air can mix in with it as it strikes the ceramic or metal surface of the basin, we are likely to see temporary bubbles forming. In pure water, with no additives which may affect bubble formation, the bubbles are strictly limited in size. In fact, we could say that the size of the bubbles are in inverse proportion to the length of time that they last.

The reason that the bubble forms in the first place is due to the strings of water molecules which happen to be directly in line with the movement of air in the stream of water. The moving air moves the water, but the electrical forces in the polar water molecules hold a sheet of it together into the shell of a bubble. The thickness of the shell of the bubble represents the length of one of these strings of water molecules.

Just as in the snowflakes and the regularly-spaced rings on icicles that we saw in Part One, the strings of molecules on one side of the bubble shell must be electrically sensitive to those on the opposite side of the shell. Thus, the water bubble is strictly limited in size. The shell can be a little bit bigger than a snowflake because it is supported by the cushion of enclosed air.

If the bubble shell was two lengths of strings of water molecules thick, it would not only diminish the electrical connection and make it more precarious but would also increase the weight of water that the cushion of enclosed air would have to support. The shell of the bubble must hold intact electrically against the cushion of air, any break at all will cause the bubble to burst. The bubble will burst at any penetration, because that changes the air pressure equilibrium.

Soap molecules in the water make much larger bubbles possible. Soap, like water, is a linking molecule. Soap cleans because one end of it's molecule links to water, and the other end to dirt. This causes soap to help carry away the dirt with the water. The larger size of soap bubbles represents the longer soap molecules. We could say that bubbles form in water because the electric-based strings of molecules gives water a clay-like quality, at least temporarily.