Why Soap Bubbles Are Perfect!

Soap bubbles are beautifully perfect and perfectly beautiful! Here I talk about how soap bubbles work, how they’re not always spheres, and how this helps us design better, lighter structures!
Two wonderful books on this topic I can recommend:
• “Soap Bubbles: Their Colors and Forces Which Mold Them” by C.V. Boys
• “A Drop Of Water: A Book of Science and Wonder” by Walter Wick
About Me:
Hi, I'm Paul Kassabian. I'm a structural engineer and a Principal at SGH in Boston, MA. Being a structural engineer is my fulltime job and I’ve also I taught full courses to graduate students at MIT for nine years, Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) for five years and at RISD (Fall 2023). These are videos based on my structural design projects and years of teaching structures to students.
Some legal/professional stuff:
As of this video, I’m a:
• Licensed Structural/Civil Engineer in 26 US States including my home state of Massachusetts.
• Professional Engineer in British Columbia
• Chartered Structural Engineer in the UK (both ICE and IStructE)
So my full designations are: Paul E. Kassabian, P.E., P.Eng (BC), C.Eng MICE MIStructE
MUSIC:
I purchased a license for use from Pond5.com
The item ID number is 32695415.
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Publisher: Kero Herning - IPI/CAE: 825536431
Composer: Kero Herning - IPI/CAE: 825536431
Title: Happy Positive Playful
License : Individual License for Commercial Use.

[@sambarlow3226]

getting heaps of value from your super articulate bides is Paul, thank you so much!

[@FoxRiverBridge]

Interesting stuff! I hope you'll talk about this subject more in length. I'm an architecture major + structural engineering minor with in interest in organic forms. It seems as though the most efficient shape for tension is not always a sphere, is that correct? That under certain conditions, the optimal shape for the bubbles and, by extension, similarly designed tensile structures, might deviate from perfectly spherical geometry?

[@sran9492]

But there are some people usually in parks who put the string with a loop in it in soapy water and make very long bubbles how do you explain that, it still remains unbursted and has an opened end

[@PaulKassabian]

Great question…Upcoming video!

[@davidandrews5262]

Is the trick to structures spreading out the load and forces?