Why champagne has stable “bubble chains” and other carbonated drinks do not
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In no world are biosurfactants added to seawater around wind turbines in order to increase the performance of an acoustically insulating bubble sheet for marine life. Can’t we just have the conversation piece and let the scientist continue on? Amortized over the millions of people that drink champagne it’s really a pretty affordable interesting piece of information.
Pure research for curiosities sake is the key factor in every notable advance that humans have done.
Science based on quarterly profits holds us back.
Yeah, Feynman got a Nobel Prize doing just that: https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html
And we can argue that money is also the key factor in almost every notable advance. In order to do research, you need equipment, access to knowledge, and time.
The first is the most obvious, equipment is not free. Access to knowledge is much easier than it once was, but still, the best way to access knowledge is to be with knowledgeable people, like in a university, and universities are not cheap, and even if they are, the location where they are usually isn't.
The last, time, is the hardest to get by. If you are working your ass off just to survive, then no time for you. You need a job that is low effort so that you don't get exhausted, that pays reasonably well so you can live comfortably, and leaves you enough time for your research. Few can enjoy that. You can also make research your job, but if that's your job, then you need to think of quarterly profits. Another option is to get supported by someone else, but it doesn't change the fact that someone is making money to support your research.
semiconductor research has propelled us forward, and it was for the most part not done for curiosity's sake. (Not that "curiosity" is anything other than evolved hunter-gatherer profit maximization, most of which was carried out on time periods shorter than a quarter.)
Besides, even in semi-conductors there is plenty of research justified only by curiosity. Some of those turn out to be important after the fact; that’s the nature of research.
And yet if learned book binders and doctors had not decided that they where much more interested in studying chemistry and physics the industry would be stuck trying to create new mechanical calculators using ever smaller gears instead.
Part of the excitement of discovering new knowledge is discovering new ways to employ it.
I doubt noise from wind turbines disrupting sea life is a real problem in the first place, but if it really is, they could try applying some ideas from submarines such as covering the base of turbine tower with rubber tiles. Rubber absorbs vibrations and converts that energy into heat.
My buddy's post doc is paid for by the military, but will have further applications in medical because both deal with fluids.
Medical doesn't pay unless you are the Physician applying the work, so he needed to get someone who will.
Also, he has yet to prove what he is looking for, he is aware he might work on this for 30 years and come up with nothing.
It is conceivable simply to have salaried researchers researching whatever takes their interest (or came up at last night's champagne reception). Of course practical experiments and equipment complicates it a bit, but not necessarily much.
Who pays for it?
The request of “but what is the application for this” often comes from those outside the field who don't understand.
Sometimes it is the selfish human nature question “yeah, but why should I care?” with different wording to try to make it look like the asker cares about a wider community. Sometimes it is a genuine question: they are intrigued by the base idea and want to know more about where it might later develop.
Often there is already an application, or a potential application. In fact sometimes this is explicitly written into the paper, but people haven't bothered to read it (or didn't understand it) and are just reacting to a headline report. For instance studies on how cereals settle in transit and how they absorb available liquid, why the bigger parts end up at the top and so forth, are favourites of “silly research” lists but can have importance for the safe transport & storage of many other things that are in particulate or powder form. Some of this sort of work has fed into understanding a very real problem causing ships carrying such cargo to roll over and break and/or sink in choppy seas (endangering lives & the environment and, what commercial sponsors of such research care about, costing money).
> Can we just find out the answer in order to find out the answer?
We definitely should be able to, and thankfully some do.
There are a lot of results in maths over the centuries that were just curiosities at the time but then later became important to a larger problem sometimes quite unrelated to the original thought space.
Though even for things that may never find a real world use, the process itself will have helped train and/or the minds of the people looking at it so has value through that.
Sounds easy enough if they believe the applications are vaguely plausible. What if there are no vaguely plausible applications acceptable by reviewers?
A lot of people are keen to work on something like that on their own. I know someone who worked on the thermodynamics of chocolate mixtures for no precise reason whatsoever, and without external funding. These things are typically short one-offs.
There are labs that have larger programs on carbonated liquids, including a well-known (in the field) lab in Reims. Those get some funding from industry in the usual form of money for post-docs or PhDs, funding for experiments, and the occasional in-kind contribution of samples. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Very cool - I've often found that the most interesting things occur not within disciplines, but at the interfaces of two areas of study/work...
Obviously that explanation is a gross oversimplification of what champagne flavor is, but could result in a novel way to evaluate/taste a glass of champagne by looking for the quality of bubble chains in it
The nucleated classes have tiny ridges on the bottom of the glass which causes the CO2 to come out of suspension and leave a chain of bubbles coming from the same spot. I have some nucleated cider glasses. It's pretty cool to watch.
> Put simply, nucleated glasses contain markings on the base (that are very often branded) to aid in nucleation. These markings are actually tiny pits known as points of nucleation. Due to their shape, these points cause gas within drinks to be released with greater ease. As a result, carbonated drinks produce more bubbles and the taste and aroma of drinks are amplified. All manner of drinks can benefit from a nucleated glass.
https://allinonemerchandise.co.uk/what-is-a-nucleated-glass/
Video of side by side comparison using beer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGgbEMDnzKc
It is not novel, it’s part of how champagne is tasted. It includes the size of the bubbles, their quantity, how close they are to each other in a chain. Fancy glasses are etched so the chains form some patterns for visual interest.