Soap Bubble Iridescence — Newton’s Ring Formation
61.00 £
A soap bubble filmed from inside, the thin film showing Newton’s ring iridescence at the moment before the film becomes critically thin and bursts — the interference bands shifting as drainage continues.
Description
Soap film interference photography captures one of the most visually compelling demonstrations of wave optics — the same physical principle that produces oil-slick rainbows, but in a pure geometric form produced by the uniform thinning of the soap film as water drains under gravity. This image was made using a wire loop dipped in soap solution and held vertically, the film photographed from the front with a black background and a diffuse white backlight. As water drains from the film, the thickness gradient creates horizontal bands of colour from the thicker base upward, progressing through the sequence of Newton’s rings: yellow, red, violet, blue-green, yellow again — each band representing a film thickness corresponding to a specific fraction of the wavelength of visible light. At the very top of the film, the blackband region indicates a film thickness approaching zero — the moment immediately before rupture
