Before reading this explanation, see if you can explain it completely. It's a very good exercise in logic and chemistry. I also thought about it pretty hard before seeking an answer, and I got the explanation only about 50% right.
Try to explain:
- where does the air come from
- why are the bubbles only along the glass
- why do the bubbles reach a constant, stable size instead of continuing to grow or shrink
There are second-order questions that are more important, but I can't ask those upfront without giving too much away.
As a side note, I should say that just doing this little bit of scientific sleuthing on the Web really scared me. I have a little son and I am imagining him doing a lot of his research for school on the web. I have a couple of engineering degrees, so even though I didn't have the complete answer, I could easily tell the idiotic answers, or even the slightly wrong answers, from the golden and true answer (tell me if I'm wrong!). But a child would probably believe any/all of what they read. The problem is not just the single instance of misinformation, but the fact that being exposed to misinformation over time actually hurts your chances of building a solid foundation for logic in your mind.
In this particular query, the first result was acceptable and came from a stellar website, Scientific American. The answer wasn't wrong, just a bit incomplete. The second result, courtesy of Yahoo! Answers, shows a page with regular people guessing at what an answer could be, and ranges from reasonable to flat out silly. The third and fourth results were kind of unrelated and short/inaccurate from WikiAnswers. Finally, the fifth result from some random site I'd never heard of called Answerbag contained the glorious answer I had been seeking, but it: 1) had no votes, either positive or negative, 2) had no comments, 3) was written in a funny 'cowboy' vernacular that could make it seem less credible, and 4) had an author whose screen name was 'notmrjohn' and whose pic is literally a horse's ass.
That's it. When Elliot is grown, he will not use the Internets for homework. We will go to the library and get books. If he needs to surf to answer that immediate question, we will do it together to separate the wheat from the chaff....
(Yeah, right - and I will feed him nothing but organic, sustainably-grown, home-cooked food and sew clothes for him of organic cloth. We all know the boy will live on the Internet without parental supervision and will eat junk food. It will be interesting to see how it all works out.)
This query also highlighted a failing in Google's ad system. The single ad shown for the query [air bubbles form in a glass of water] is this, it's almost poetic:
Bubble Glass Water
Bubble Glass Water Online.Shop Target.com.
www.Target.com
Yeah. I'm sure Target would love to sell me some air bubbles. They, Google, should have known that I was looking up something about basic science and tried to sell me a science kit, a subscription to a basic sci mag, or some kit for making bubbles. It's all in the gestalt of language people; put it together now. A human could do it, so eventually the computers will too, if we tell them to.
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