Bubbles!
Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 2:53 pm
Hearing earlier how the nascent Universe [well - actually a few 100 million years or so post the big-bang] turned from opaque to transparent as ionising radiation from the newly formed giant ultra violet emiting blue stars radiated out and stripped the opaque soup of hydrogen atoms of their electrons, I was minded to muse on the phenomena as I was doing my dish-washing after lunch today. Transparency arose in bubble shaped envelopes around the new stars, the bubbles getting ever bigger like holes in a dutch cheese, until they eventually coalesced at which point there was no opaqueness [cheese] left [about 500 million years post big-bang], and the universe appeared for the first time in a form that we would recognise as being like that which still pertains today. All very good you might say - but by this time I had reached the end of my washing up and, having drained the sink, found that I had half a sink of pristine bubbles which stubbornly refused to be washed down the plug-hole, try as I might by running the cold tap onto them.
Changing tack, I took a damp micro-fibre cloth from beneath the sink and laying it over the stubborn bubbles crushed them from existence into its highly absorbent man-made material [what is that stuff anyway?] In a few short moments, bubbles were but a faded memory, but the cloth was wringing wet. Squeezing the contents of the saturated synthetic into the sink, I was surprised to find that what came out appeared to be almost wholly water! Where is the oily detergent that had caused all of the bubble trouble in the first place; where the crushed phosphor-lipid residue from which the skin of so many stubborn hemispheres should have been formed. 15ml of detergent could not so easily have hidden amongst the twisted out slops of the cloth that it should have been insensible to the minute inspection I now gave it - yet trace of it there was none to be found. Like the neck of Charles Dickens guillotine victims it had simply vanished, neither to be felt adhering to the micro-fibre mesh of the cloth, nor indeed as residue on the brushed stainless-steel finish of a new [and expensive] kitchen sink, lost to the Universe as surely as that opaqueness that vanished in a froth of coalescing bubbes all those many eons ago.
(
C'mon - that was a fun post!)
Changing tack, I took a damp micro-fibre cloth from beneath the sink and laying it over the stubborn bubbles crushed them from existence into its highly absorbent man-made material [what is that stuff anyway?] In a few short moments, bubbles were but a faded memory, but the cloth was wringing wet. Squeezing the contents of the saturated synthetic into the sink, I was surprised to find that what came out appeared to be almost wholly water! Where is the oily detergent that had caused all of the bubble trouble in the first place; where the crushed phosphor-lipid residue from which the skin of so many stubborn hemispheres should have been formed. 15ml of detergent could not so easily have hidden amongst the twisted out slops of the cloth that it should have been insensible to the minute inspection I now gave it - yet trace of it there was none to be found. Like the neck of Charles Dickens guillotine victims it had simply vanished, neither to be felt adhering to the micro-fibre mesh of the cloth, nor indeed as residue on the brushed stainless-steel finish of a new [and expensive] kitchen sink, lost to the Universe as surely as that opaqueness that vanished in a froth of coalescing bubbes all those many eons ago.
(
C'mon - that was a fun post!)
