Soap Bubbles and Geometry: Lord Kelvin's Quest for Form

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]shape by itself, a soap bubble will be naturally spherical, but when you put them together, then you have the role of the pressure, but you also have the role of the contact line balancing mechanical force.

[00:00:13]And in the 19th century, Kelvin, Lord Kelvin, tried to understand foam, soap soap film, and foam in general, and tried to see if there was a simple model for it. And his first idea was to use the truncated octahedron, but he realized very quickly that it doesn't fit the basic rule of mechanical equilibrium at one node, because the at one node, when you have four different edges meeting, you must have the same angle in all the faces.