Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen faced many hardships on their treks to the South Pole, from frostbite to snow blindness. Few biographies, though, mention that much of their misery was caused by the ideal gas law, which governs the relationship between the pressure, volume, and temperature of a gas. It is this crucial law of physics, explains British physicist Helen Czerski in her new book Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life, that generates the fearsome katabatic winds, which rake the surface of Antarctica at almost 200 miles an hour.
This is just one example of how the science of physics informs every aspect of life, says Czerski. When National Geographic caught up with her by phone from London, she elaborated further—on the importance of bubbles (her specialty), the physics lessons taught by your toaster, and why it doesn't help to bang the bottom of the bottle if no ketchup comes out.
You are the first expert on bubbles that I have ever interviewed. Tell us how you got into this arcane field—and why it frequently involves voyages on ships in stormy seas.
[Laughs] Bubbles are the unsung heroes of the physical world. They’re everywhere, doing very useful things. No one pays attention to them, but they’re important because a bubble, which is made up of a liquid and a gas, can do things that the liquid and the gas, each individually, can’t do.
Imagine the froth on top of your cappuccino. If you put a spoon on top of that, the foam will support the spoon. But if you put that spoon on top of just gas, or just liquid, it would fall straight through. Mix the liquid and gas together and suddenly they can do something entirely new.
I got into the field of bubble physics because my Ph.D. was in experimental physics. I’m an experimentalist. I build things, and I was building experiments to use high-speed photography to look at events that were so small and so fast that they could be happening right in front of your eyes and you couldn’t see them. I was fascinated by the world that was right here but just beyond what you’re able to see.
Bubbles breaking apart and joining together also happens extremely quickly—and it’s extremely small—so you need those special techniques to see what’s happening. Now I study the bubbles underneath breaking waves, where lots of bubbles are breaking up in that washing machine kind of turbulence. When the bubbles go back down into the ocean they’re important for helping our oceans breathe. They’re like little packets of gas carried down into the water.
I go out on ships to measure bubbles, usually in storm season, in the Mid-Atlantic. You look out over the deck at that familiar sight of breaking waves, something seafarers have seen for centuries, but just a meter below the surface you can see something that they have never been able to see. We need to understand it because it’s part of the clockwork of our planet, one of the mechanisms making our planet run.
Some people might think of physicists as nerdy figures in lab coats remote from normal life. But your book shows us that in our everyday life we are all physicists. Give us some examples.
That’s a fantastically outdated vision of a physicist! [Laughs] Physics is all about the rules that make the world work, and we all use them every day whether we’re aware of it or not. We don’t necessarily use them systematically but we’re familiar with the way things work.
When you’re baking bread, for example, one of the main things you want is to have bubbles in your dough. You use various methods to put bubbles into bread. You can use a raising agent or yeast, or you can fold air into the bread. When you put that in a hot oven and heat the gas up, the molecules inside the bubbles will bounce off the walls like tiny bumper cars and push them outwards, which makes the bread expand and rise. That comes from something called the Ideal Gas Law: the idea that the pressure, temperature, and volume of a pocket of gas are related to each other. Once you’ve got that little bit of physics, you’ve got the internal combustion engine, winds from Antarctica, and 