How does soap make bubbles?
Moment of Um
American Public Media
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We know how important it is to wash our hands with soap and warm water. Get between the fingers, under the nails, all that good stuff. But why does soap get all foamy when you add water? Where do those bubbles come from? We asked University of Minnesota professor Frank Bates to help us find the answer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um. |
| 0:07.9 | Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Mark Sanchez. |
| 0:12.5 | Um. |
| 0:17.0 | Been pulling weeds for hours on the garden path. |
| 0:22.6 | I'll smell like sweaty socks. |
| 0:24.6 | Now it's time to take a bath. |
| 0:27.6 | Got the water nice and hot, but I feel like a dope. |
| 0:32.6 | I squeezed the bottle hard and put on way too much soap. |
| 0:38.3 | I got the bubble trouble, bubble trouble blues. |
| 0:46.3 | You know I do. |
| 0:51.3 | This is nothing to sing about. |
| 0:53.3 | The bubbles keep piling higher and higher. |
| 0:55.0 | What is going on? |
| 0:57.0 | My name is Isabella, and I'm from Carmel, Indiana. |
| 1:01.0 | My question for you is, how does soap make bubbles? |
| 1:05.0 | The first important point is that it's not just soap. It's soap and water. |
| 1:12.1 | And in fact, it's mostly water, really a lot of water with a little bit of soap in it. |
| 1:19.0 | I'm Frank Bates, and I'm a regents professor at the University of Minnesota. |
| 1:25.1 | I teach classes in chemical engineering and also in material science and |
| 1:31.1 | engineering. And that's all about how to make materials and how to process them into items you're all |
| 1:40.2 | familiar with. I work in particular on plastics. So bubbles are actually very thin film of water. |
| 1:49.3 | It's not a lot of water. There's air on the inside and air on the outside. And so the big question is |
... |
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