For centuries, nobody has offered a satisfying explanation for this weird periodic deviation in the motion of some bubbles through water, which has been called "Leonardo's paradox."
Now, a pair of scientists think they may have finally solved the longstanding riddle by developing new simulations that match high-precision measurements of the effect, according to a study published on Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The results suggest that bubbles can reach a critical radius that pushes them into new and unstable paths due to interactions between the flow of water around them and the subtle deformations of their shapes.
"The motion of bubbles in water plays a central role for a wide range of natural phenomena, from the chemical industry to the environment," said authors Miguel Herrada and Jens Eggers, who are fluid physics researchers at the University of Seville and the University of Bristol respectively, in the study. "The buoyant rise of a single bubble serves as a much-studied paradigm, both experimentally and theoretically."
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