This wasn't usually what my lab looked like after an explosives experiment, but there were probably days when it wasn't far off.
The original caption is "God as a kid tries to make a chicken in his room".
Here's what happens almost every time you see a bubble generated from gas coming from a nozzle - for example if you put a straw in a glass with the bendy bit pointing upwards and blew down it very slowly. You can't see it because your eyes can only resolve events that last about 20 ms (20 thousandths of a second) or longer. This whole event is over in less than one thousandth of a second, so no human could see it directly. A microsecond (ms) is one millionth of a second. The reason that we are interested in bubbles being born like this is that when the pinch-off happens, the pointed bit goes ping. The surface tension of the bubble is pulling on it really really hard, so the pointy bit zooms up towards the rest of the bubble so fast that it overshoots and makes a jet on the inside. That's where all the energy is. In the last image, you can see waves of that energy starting to travel around the outside of the bubble. And what does the bubble do with all that energy? It rings like a bell. Little bubbles make high notes and big bubbles make lower tones. And when you hear ocean waves, most of what you hear is the sound of the new bubbles ringing. After a while they have given away all their energy to the water, so they go quiet.
