Inaugural Lecture Marguerite Perey Chair - Bubbles and Foams - Wiebke Drenckhan

Inaugural lecture of the Marguerite Perey Chair in the natural sciences

Programme

Bubbles and foams: from ephemeral beauty to innovative materials

Bubbles are among the most fragile and fleeting objects we encounter. Their ephemeral nature invites us to pause and delight in their iridescent beauty — just before they vanish in a sudden collapse. Yet, although bubbles have fascinated us for centuries, they remain far from trivial: understanding and controlling the stability of their liquid films, a hundred times thinner than a human hair, continues to inspire active research at the interface between physics and chemistry.

When bubbles come together, they form foams — ubiquitous companions of everyday life, from the milk foam on a morning cappuccino to the froth of an evening beer, via dishwashing or shaving foams. These bubbly assemblies belong to the fascinating world of 'soft matter': materials that can behave both like liquids and solids. Despite their apparent simplicity, they are in fact highly complex systems, in which multiple phenomena interact across a wide range of length and time scales. Predicting their resulting properties remains a rich and ongoing challenge in modern science.

In their solid form, foams are just as pervasive: they insulate our homes, cushion our sleep, and help athletes jump higher. These diverse applications raise fundamental scientific questions: how can we predict the relationships between structure and properties, and how can we design innovative materials with tailored functionalities using more sustainable resources?

In this lecture, I will take you on a journey through the modern physics of bubbles and foams. You will discover how these systems — liquid or solid — conceal deep, long-standing, and sometimes surprising scientific questions within seemingly simple everyday materials. I will also show how these mechanisms can be harnessed to address pressing societal challenges, from the design of environmentally-friendly materials to the degradation of biofilms and microplastics.

Accompanied by a live bubble performance and musical improvisation, this talk deliberately blurs the boundaries between scientific and artistic experiment and expression, offering an interdisciplinary perspective on how we observe, understand, and imagine the behaviour of matter.

• Read more about Wiebke Drenckhan and her background: Portrait of Wiebke Drenckhan - Drawing science out of its bubble

THE MARGUERITE PEREY CHAIR

The Marguerite Perey Chair in the natural sciences is named in honour of Marguerite Perey (1909-1975), a French physicist who is recognised for her discovery of the element francium. In her early career, she was mentored by Marie Curie and subsequently studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was made head of department of nuclear chemistry at the University of Strasbourg in 1949 and was the first woman to be elected at the French Academy of Sciences in 1962.