The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 17: Spheres of Splendor: The Science of Bubbles Summary & Analysis

Not every new finding about the periodic table takes place under extreme circumstances like in the last chapter. Donald Glaser was a 25-year-old professor at the University of Michigan in 1952. At the time, particle physicists were using information from the Manhattan Project to produce zany new particles and some were hoping that these particles “would overthrow the periodic table as the fundamental map of matter.” Glaser, meanwhile, was looking at a glass of beer and thinking about how, in liquids, bubbles appear around flaws or anomalies. He began developing ideas of a “bubble chamber” similar to the cloud chambers that already existed for gases. In these chambers, a “gun” fired atoms at cold gas atoms at high speed.

While it’s true that Glaser was the inventor of the bubble chamber, the idea that he did so while staring at a glass of beer is myth. However, the myth survives because inside the chamber, Glaser chose beer as the liquid at which to shoot the atomic gun. Sadly, this didn’t actually work very well. Glaser had more success with hydrogen, so much so that he ended up winning the Nobel Prize at only 33. Bubbles were not taken seriously as a “scientific tool” for centuries. However, by the time the 20th century arrived, scientists had finally begun to appreciate the special properties and power of bubbles. Indeed, the special role of bubbles in human history would leave one to expect there to be “a long tradition of bubble science,” but this is not the case.

Despite occasional interest from a couple of prominent scientists, bubble science didn’t really become a “respectable field” until 1900. Ernest Rutherford and Lord Kelvin were the men who finally got the rest of the scientific community to take bubble science seriously. Rutherford was a New Zealander with a memorable, eccentric personality. After completing graduate school at the University of Cambridge, he took a post in Montreal, picking up where Marie Curie’s research had left off. He let pitchblende decay inside a flask, then took bubbles from what remained. These provided samples of radium and polonium, as well as a new element: radon. Conducting further research, he made yet another important discovery: alpha particles are “escaped helium atoms with an early ‘neon’ light.”

Rutherford announced this new discovery while accepting his 1908 Nobel Prize. He knew that the alpha-helium connection would allow scientists to measure the date of the earth, which for much of history until that point had been calculated via the Old Testament of the Bible. Lord Kelvin (whose full name was William Thomson) had been working on the question of the earth’s age for a long time and had eventually come up with the number 20 million years, which was completely wrong. However, a new method for calculating the age of the earth emerged through Rutherford’s helium bubble discovery. He began searching for helium bubbles inside rocks, which could then be measured against the rate of radioactive decay in order to come up with an accurate age.

By the time Rutherford found his number, Lord Kelvin was 80 and his mind was no longer sharp. Still, Rutherford worried about disputing the age Kelvin had come up with, although when it came to his actual presentation he managed to do so in a way that flattered the elderly scientist. Nonetheless, Rutherford waited until Kelvin died to prove his helium-uranium hypothesis, announcing that the earth was actually 500 million years old. This, too, was actually wrong, but Rutherford’s decision to date the earth using radioactive bubbles was correct and would be the key to humanity finally learning the planet’s true age.

Rutherford started a scientific trend of digging from element bubbles inside rocks; it soon became a routine part of a geologist’s research. Moreover, this technique was also transposed to other fields, including theoretical physics and quantum mechanics. It came to be known as “froth science,” and Lord Kelvin was credited as one of its major pioneers. The field of cell biology also began here, as cells have what is essentially a bubble structure. Years later, a scientist named Seth Putterman was being teased by his colleague at UCLA for not knowing how sound waves transmute bubbles into light. Putterman, who worked in the subfield of fluid dynamics, was shocked to realize that this indeed wasn’t available knowledge. He embarked on a series of “low-tech experiments” to discover the truth himself.   

Putterman’s research demonstrated an important connection between the nonreactive quality of noble gases and sonoluminescence, the process when a bubble emits short bursts of light when targeted with sonar energy. Putterman himself ended up trying to link his findings to the pathological science of cold fusion, thereby discrediting himself and his work. That aside, bubble science remained an incredibly important scientific mode.