I’ve heard that there are “millions and millions” of bubbles in a bub-tub, but has anyone ever actually counted them to make sure ?
I can’t believe I’m answering this… but anyway, I’m sure the number of bubbles in a bubble bath varies on the amount of water used, the amount of bubble solution used, the size of the bathtub, and the amount of agitation in the water.
No, nobody has ever counted.
Too many variables to give a solid answer.
Word to the wise, you’ll make off a lot better if you post questions with a definite answer, otherwise you’ll come across as a dolt.
463,985,645,174.
Within a 10.7% margin of error.
To the contrary, I think open-ended questions strike me as perfect Cecil-worthy material. It’s all these quick answer questions that bore me to tears. There must be some way to gauge the number of bubbbles: say, count the number in a few cubic inches using a certain soap, then multiply to the appropriate bathtub size?
It’s not quite as simple as that.
In my experience, as soon as I get in the bath, or not as the case may be, the number of bubbles begins to decrease at an unknown rate.
Determining the number of bubbles in the bath at the time of first application of the bubble bath to the water will involve reverse extrapolation from the perceived total derived by whatever means at any given time.
Enabling this calculation will involve ascertaining the rate of bubble decrease for a given bubble bath for a given bath.
I am not a physicist, or a beautician, but the different environments in which baths are taken (bathrooms) vary greatly in configuration, temperature, and lots of other things which might affect the formula.
They should print these details on the label to save us all this trouble.
That’s about the same as asking how many crack rocks need one smoke to turn their lips blue.
How many crack rocks need one smoke to ask a question like “How many bubbles are there in a bubble bath?” in GQ?
Well, let’s take a wild guesstimate… Which would be better than anything else thus far in the thread. A bubble bath is mostly foam, no? So, let’s say a typical bubble is about a millimeter in diameter. That’s a volume of 5.210[sup]-10[/sup] m[sup]3[/sup] per bubble. A bathtub is approximately rectangular; mine is about .7 m by 1.5 m, and we’ll assume that the foam is about 10 cm deep. That gives us a total bubble volume of .105 m[sup]3[/sup]. Divided by our previous number, we get 210[sup]8[/sup] bubbles, or 200 million.
Sultan Kinkari, a word of advice: It’s a Very Bad Idea to imply that a fellow poster is smoking crack rocks. It’s an Even Worse Idea to do so in GQ.
I would prefer more interesting, creative - and less insulting - analogies here myself. - Jill
Thanks Chronos. I got around 400 million 1 mm bubbles as a first guess, but tub sizes do vary some.
In order to get a better estimate, you need to know something about the size distribution of the bubbles. A quick look reveals many more small bubbles than large ones, so there’s probably a power law of some sort in operation. The exact shape of the distribution curve probably depends on how much air the water stream forces into the tub, the type and concentration of the surfactant, ionic strength, atmospheric humidity, temp. etc. etc, but that’s something that any chemist, physicist or engineer involved in the design of foam products should know well enough to give a ballpark figure. There’s also the thickness of the bubble wall, which sets a lower limit on the size of individual bubbles. I don’t know if that limit is 0.5 mm or 0.05 mm. In the later case there could be trillions, not millions, of bubbles in a typical tub. I’d hate to think that Mr. Bubble has been lying to me all these years. :eek:
Then we had better discard philosophy, physics, and psychology, among other disciplines.
Maybe I should have said “How many crack rocks need Marion Barry smoke in order to ask a question like that in GQ?”
Chickenhead, touche.
Squink, I suggest that you ask questions with far less variables. Poor examples would be “How many snowflakes are there in Michigan in December?” or “How many marbles are secretly lodged in your brain as the result of not wearing noseplugs before you went to bed as a child, allowing access to marble-toting gnomes that lived in every shag rug in the 1970’s?”
Damn, I spent all my life counting the bubbles in the head of foam on my Guinness…
Maybe you should have just kept your damned mouth shut and let more able people answer a question that was clearly beyond your abilities to comprehend. If I had wanted a limited specific factual answer I would have phrased the question in such a way as to make it simple for simple people to supply a simple answer. Had I wanted to scare everyone away from even looking at the question I would have phrased it in terms of gas permiabilities and bubble packing geometrys. The answer to the question is in some range between 0 and 10[sup]30[/sup] so. I suspect a few people out there might be able to narrow things down a bit on that. Do you have some problem with my wanting to find that out ? Has your brain turned to Liquid popcorn ? Who the hell died and made you God of appropriate questions ?
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To return to the question at hand:
How many bubbles are there in a bubble bath ?
Sultan, if this isn’t a SD question, I don’t know what is.
Is my mouth damned? I had no idea. Did you damn my mouth? At least my mouth isn’t dental dammed.
If you expect bubbles to be perfectly round, then there are not more than 10,000. All the others are parts of bubbles nestled amongst each other, most never forming a proper sphere.
I would also be impossible, I feel , to get an accurate count, since the bubbles begin bursting virtually from the moment the water begins to run.
Is anyone else using this sig? I’m not sure where I heard it.
Yes, but you could count a small representative volume and multiply by the appropriate factor. There’s probably some sorting going on as the density of large bubbles would be less than small ones, but that could also be accounted for. The bursting rate could also be accounted for. Unless I missed something, the two critical factors here are the size distribution function and the minimum bubble size.
In all the hubbub, did y’all miss Chronos’ reply?
IMHO, that’s your answer. The only possible refinement could be in the average bubble diameter-I don’t know that this figure is inaccurate, but I have a feeling it’s theoretical and not empirical.