In the photos: Old pictures of a bursting soap bubble. A tube is visible from above, through which the bubble is inflated. On the right is a needle piercing a bubble. The photos were taken with a regular camera. No super-fast movie cameras!

The history of the pictures is as follows.

A good friend of mine who worked as a photographer at the hospital came to see me.

He told me a sad story:

He studied for two years at special courses for “Scientific photographers” (the first time I heard such a phrase).

And, here’s the diploma thesis. It is necessary to take some interesting picture, somehow related to science or some interesting event in physics, biology, medicine, nature, etc.

We started sorting through the options.

A ball of water that gets hit by a bullet…?

It won’t do!

Why?

“Half of my class,” – he said, — “are employees of all kinds of military institutes and factories. And they’ll take hundreds of these pictures with their super-fast cameras. They’ve already told me different options.

Then is there anything unexpected under the microscope…?

It won’t do!

The second half of the course works in various research institutes and has already photographed all kinds of images with magnification of ten and a hundred thousand times, of course, with electron microscopes.

Don’t you have any in the hospital?

Yes, yes, the doctor is angry and doesn’t like me and won’t give me a dime. In addition, you need a snapshot, not a paper printout of the view through a microscope.

“You know what,” I said, “take a picture of a bursting soap bubble.

It won’t do!

Why?

First of all, I don’t have a high-speed movie camera.

Secondly, I can get a sensitive microphone, but the bubble bursts almost soundlessly.

Actually, I know who will bring what, and no one will have a bubble. But you can’t even buy a movie camera like that, and it costs a lot, and I get a modest salary as a science photographer. That’s why my boss demanded that I get a diploma, otherwise he wouldn’t keep me at all.

Then I came up with everything and told him that I would make a small and very primitive device with which he could capture the phases of the bubble bursting with his usual camera. I recommended that he add glycerin to the soapy water to make the bubble more stable.

I put together this “setup” and gave it to him to “play”.

He “played!”

A few days later, joyful brought me the photos. There were even colored, very beautiful colored interferences on the soap film, but I seem to have lost them.

And his thesis was accepted with the highest mark not only for the purely photographic qualities of the images, but also for his “ingenuity”!

I was heartily happy for him!

15 XI 2019

P.S. Those who wish can think about how it was done. Again, the device is primitive to the extreme.

But the pictures are very funny. By the way, those who revealed to me, at least, how strangely and unexpectedly, the wave of rupture of the thinnest film of a soap bubble spreads. I thought she was walking along the bubble to the blow-up tube. And the fourth picture shows a part of the bubble hanging in the air that has not yet exploded! And micro droplets of the “exploded” film flying at high speed.

Amazing!