2/13/02: Soap Bubbles, Sheep, and Science
When I was about five years old, I was a bubble scientist. My neighbor Trang – a Viet Namese girl – and I would play in her backyard and blow bubbles and study them. Next time you blow a bubble, catch it on the wand and watch the colors swirl. Trang and I scientifically determined that bubbles change color according to a determined pattern. They start off with all the colors – purple and green and blue – then the predominant color becomes orange, then black, the clear… then it pops. If you blow a bubble and catch it and pop it on the wand, then blow another bubble with that same film, the color pattern picks up where it left off. In other words, if you catch an orange bubble and pop it, the bubble you blow from that film will start off orange then very quickly turn black, then clear, then pop.
What’s interesting now is that it seems Dolly the cloned sheep has developed premature arthritis. My Boy says that this is because cells have a life span and when you use an aged cell for a clone, the creature that results will be as old from the beginning as the cell was when you took it from the host. This made perfect sense to me, and I said so. My Boy was surprised I understood his somewhat convoluted scientific explanation. I said, yes, of course. It’s just like bubbles. I could have told you that this would happen. I could have told you when I was five.