Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you look at the soap bubbles in the sink when you're doing dishes, you'll see the incredible diversity of shapes in there. There are cubes in there; there are decahedrons and tetrahedrons; there are odd, irregular shapes without names, you know.
I tried to do a puppet show on the streets, and I wasn't a very good street performer. But I found that I could stand in one place in Central Park and bounce a soap bubble on my arm, and I didn't have to gather a crowd for the puppet show. I had a crowd.
If you look at the Karamazov Brothers on TV, they're really small and the heart is taken out of their act. That's true for most variety acts. I'm an exception. When the camera comes in close and looks at those soap bubbles, you can really see what bubbles do.
It's an electrical network, isn't it? It's molecules in space... and they're linked to each other electrically. Which is to say, one end of a soap molecule is attracted to a nearby water molecule electrically. The bubble is this network. The whole thing is inter-dependent.
I took a job at a factory in New Jersey to try to save money to go to Europe. When I took the job, I set a date for quitting. I was going to hitchhike around, be a hippie, see the world. I just wanted to be responsible long enough to get up the money to get there and trip around.
There is a dream on the street. I hear it constantly - finding a piece of land, raising food, building a house. I hear talk of hopelessness. The price of land, you know. Housing is impossible. They are trapped in a cycle. How can you ask for a job after you've been sleeping in the bushes all night?
I had to find a way to get off the streets because it was too windy. So I started organizing variety shows of street performers. I would rent a hall, cafe or bar so I could put on a show. I did that for years before the 'Tonight Show With Johnny Carson' heard about this odd thing I did with bubbles.
There is a lot of science in bubbles. They are just like our weather system. The earth is, in effect, trapped inside a liquid sphere, the troposphere, where our weather forms. The bright colors on the outside of a bubble are just varying thicknesses of bubble, just like the varying thicknesses of clouds.
When I do the dodecahedron with the science audiences, I'll point out that I can only do three of the five forms with bubbles, since bubbles only join at three-way corners. The two I can't do are the ones that represent water and air. That always gets a big laugh from the mathematicians. They see the irony in it.
I love hands-on science and teaching the kids. I love to see kids experiment with things that they can make happen. Not just something you read the directions to and put it together that way. Things that can be constructed, something they can touch. What a great day when you can touch a child's mind with these ideas.