How would one go about measuring the volume of a giant soap bubble at any given snapshot of time?

How would one go about measuring the volume of a giant soap bubble at any given snapshot of time?

Assuming you had an infinite budget, what equipment would you need to do this?

3D scanner

Could this measure only the volume of air within the bubble, excluding the volume of the soap bubble film?

> Blow the bubble next to large graph paper.
> calculate volume using (4/3) pi r^3 because the bubble popped by then, so I don't care what the volume is.
> Spend the rest of my less than infinite budget on retirement, since infinity does not exist.

Just a couple of digital cameras (tripped simultaneously) located around it and a little software to do the integration.

Not OP.
I thought of that, but the bubble's non-spherical because of the way the soap is draining.

You can probably look up the thickness of a soap bubble.

This. The bubble will always deviate from a regular spherical shape.

How many cameras do you reckon you'd need to build an accurate model?

3 or 4 should be plenty.
You need 2 at right angles to tell distances.
More refine the shape to account for wind effects. You'll notice your picture isn't perfectly left-right symmetrical.

Wouldn't we need 6 at the very least? The outline of the bubble might be different for both +ve and -ve perspectives for each axis.

>look up the thickness of a soap bubble
it's variable, brainlet

turn 360 degrees and walk away

Measure the amount of air you blow into it.
the thickness of the bubble is going to be quite small and not going to contribute much to the over all volume. But if you really have an unlimited budget, you take an X-ray hologram of the bubble to figure out where all the atoms in the soap bubble are

integrate what

>You're back at the same place, and walk into the bubble, but you wanted to go back to 4th grade!

Isn't there air going into the bubble that isn't directly coming from you as well?

Are you saying that the x-ray hologram technique is the most robust and most accurate way to accomplish this?

Or you could just use the color of the bubble to determine the thickness. The color comes from the thickness and interference from the internally and externally reflected light.

No, you could use a gamma ray hologram to get even more detail, but we currently do not have a means of producing coherent gamma rays to do so. That being said, taking an X-ray hologram of a bubble, would be an enormously expensive undertaking. There is even the chance it would be more expensive than the LHC. Oh and both techniques would destroy the bubble in the process, and quite possibly, whatever was around the bubble too.

Measure the change in mass of the thing producing the bubble before and after. You know how much soap, the volume of the air it encompasses, so you can find how thin it stretches. You won't know how thick it is at any point on the bubble, but you will know how much total volume the soap occupies.

The volume of the soap bubble is equal to the volume of the soap that was used to make it.
NEXT

this

the bubble could drip and lose soap. Soap could also be lost via evaporation. Nice try.