Customer Reviews

The Physics of Foams

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The Physics of Foams by Denis Weaire and Stefan Hutzler is a lucid, terse and coherent introduction to the realm of foams. Weaire, who is co-author of another delightful text "The Pursuit of Perfect Packing", presents ideas about minimum surfaces, packing problems, and associated structural question with simple and elegant examples.

The authors use minimum of mathematics to emphasize the key ideas related to foam rheology, drainage, stability, structure, coarsening and conductivity. By drawing their examples from varied sources (bubble rafts, beer foam, metal foam, magnetic froth, soap suds), and citing relevant experimental and simulation results that explain the concepts, Weaire and Hutzler have created a text that will be handy to instructors everywhere. As a scientific treatise, it connects our understanding with ideas emanating from observing beer and soap bubbles, thinking about Kepler or Kelvin's hypothesis about packing, and basic understanding of properties of (complex) fluids. The text is entertaining, and is supplemented by innumerable illustrations to make it a worthwhile reading for anyone remotely interested in foam physics.

In context of the other review, I may add that the text comes with a list of useful articles and books that can be referred to by the serious researchers interested in deeper questions or details left out of the text. Brevity of presentation has its own merits, and learning and teaching through analogies and intuition is favored and practiced in this informal, but elegant text. Recommended reading!

Complete but not intuitive. Don't have alternative recommendation if you want to learn about foams.