It seems that scientists have found an explanation that solves a mystery in physics that left them baffled for centuries.
Leonardo’s Paradox, named after the Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci who observed the phenomenon, is about the way bubbles of air rise through water to the surface in a zigzag or spiral pattern.
The musician couldn’t explain why the bubbles moved in this way instead of rising in a straight line, as the laws of physics suggest, but he did find a relationship between bubble size and motion: the unexpected motion only occurred once the bubble achieved a spherical radius of about one millimeter.
For more than 500 years, fluid dynamics scientists have been unable to come up with a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon, until now they have solved the mystery.
Two researchers from the Spanish “University of Seville” and the British “University of Bristol” used a computational framework to simulate air bubbles that rise through water, and found through calculations that they take unstable paths once they reach a low critical diameter. [يسبق التحول إلى ذرة] It is 0.926 millimeters.
This is because the water pressure surrounding the bubbles creates subtle distortions in their shape, causing the wobbling motion.
The findings are detailed in a study titled “The Zigzag Path of an Air Bubble Rising in Water,” published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In this context, the paper mentioned the following: “Since the Renaissance” it was stated in documents that an air bubble on its way to the surface of the water will deviate from its straight and fixed path to perform a periodic zigzag or spiral movement once the bubble is above the exact diameter level.
But the turbulent bubble rise [غير المستقر] It defies quantitative description, and the physical mechanism remains controversial. However, using a digital mapping technique, we found for the first time a quantitative fit with high-resolution measures of instability.”
The researchers concluded that the discovery of this mechanism opens the door to advancing further studies on “small pollutants present in most practical environments, which simulate particulate matter between [الجسم] Steel and gas.
