The Physics of Beer Bubbles

Roland Piquepaille writes "Yesterday, I told you about virtual beer. Today, we follow two North America researchers who are studying the physics of real beer bubbles. 'Singly scattered waves form the basis of many imaging techniques such as radar or seismic exploration.' But pouring beer in a mug involves multiply scattered acoustic waves. They are more complex to study, but they can be used to look at various phenomena, such as predicting volcanic eruptions or understanding the movement of particles in fluids like beer. They also could be used to monitor the structural health of bridges and buildings or the stability of food products over time. Read more for additional references and a photo showing how the researchers monitor beer bubbles."

Possible uses

[fishthegeek]

They could use the random interactions of the beer bubbles as a random number generator for crypto. This is much cooler than the plain ol' lava-lamp random number generator that Sun uses.

Plus this gives the added advantage of being able to recruit college students that are torn between a degree in Art History, and one in Math by telling them that they'll be forced to work with beer. It's a Win/Win situation!

Re:Devil's Advocate here.

[BlueParrot]

Yea, because it is possible to determine now what will be worthwhile science in 50 years time... You know quantum mechanics pretty much started with physicists trying to explain how infra-red radiation behaves inside a hot oven. I doubt many people at the time expected that research to develop into solid-state physics, which is what the guys over at Intel rely on to make their CPUs...

One thing that's always interested me...

[Fyz]

I work at a bar, and sometimes i see an interesting phenomenon in beer glasses. If you leave a draft beer out and let the foam fizzle away, after a while(but not too long or the foam will disappear completely) the foam will coalesce into a ring shaped pattern of circles, equally sized and spaced and at the same distance from the rim and centre of the glass.
It takes about half an hour for this pattern to form, and for the life of me, I can't figure out what makes it!
Anyone?

Re:One thing that's always interested me...

[gardyloo]

I would guess you are seeing a combination of the "Cheerio Effect" (see Wikipedia) and the mild feedback as popping and coalescing bubbles set up standing waves (approximately at the maxima of the J0 Bessel functions which would describe such waves confined at the liquid interface).

Re:One thing that's always interested me...

[glomph]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9nard_cells [wikipedia.org] I believe it's related to this phenomenon, the bubbles act as markers. I've seen these while flying over small ponds in New England in the early A.M., composed of the fog over the (relatively) warm water.

Re:What about tea?

[1u3hr]

And can it be used to power a starship drive?

Of course the Infinite Improbability Drive is powered by tea.

But Poul Anderson had a real beer-powered spaceship. [fantasticfiction.co.uk]

Futurama Bender Beer Brewing robot

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect time to point this out. A full sized, beer brewing, talking Bender.

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/bender [asciimation.co.nz]

At your local micro-brewery

[Flying pig]

Forget the big brewers, they are just marketing organisations. Eventually the product will consist of yellow dye and bio-ethanol, and by then the "consumer" won't even notice. The real research is done in small breweries and micro-breweries. Just get yourself an MSc or PhD in microbiology first.

Nowadays the thing I ask myself is "will this job be of any value if civilisation collapses?" If you work in a call centre or IT, be very afraid...but if you can fix a broken irrigation pump or generator, build a house from traditional materials, grow food or brew beer, you probably have a future. Why beer? Well, apart from the likely demand for the product qua beer, earlier societies produced "small beer" (i.e. low strength) for general consumption because the brewing process killed fecal and soil bacteria, and the alcohol then kept the product sterile. In a society without clean drinking water, and no sewers, beer was what stood between you and dysentery.