BALLS of shadow dissolve into a seething mist of droplets. To capture the way a balloon deforms as it bursts, James Huse, Josh Eaton and Steve Keylock spent hours working in darkness. They filled balloons with milk, hung them up in a studio (the photos are inverted), turned out the lights and left a camera with its shutter open. A craft knife on a stick was used to burst the balloons and the resulting pop triggered a flash of light.
鈥淭he flash exposes the image,鈥� says Huse. 鈥淪o long as the shutter is open at the time around the reaction then you鈥檒l capture it.鈥�
of Princeton University and his colleagues have also been snapping bursting bubbles, this time on a liquid surface.
Advertisement
When they pop, (Nature, ). The physics of the process is the same with any liquid 鈥� even viscous oil 鈥� and Stone鈥檚 team believes the work could provide insights into how aerosols form.
Another team has looked at the fate of particles inside a hypothetical atomic-scale balloon when it pops. Do the particles scatter according to the rules of classical mechanics or are they governed by quantum lore?
The answer is both, according to of the University of Massachusetts Boston and colleagues (). Olshanii says that there may be implications for the emerging field of quantum computing. 鈥淲e could try to minimise quantum information loss,鈥� he says.