Bubble Planets

My 2013 Masters thesis at Central Saint Martins, London was focused on the subject of the bubble as a metaphor for the brevity of life. In seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings, the soap bubble was used as a visual metaphor to remind the viewer of the transient nature of life. The soap bubble exists for just a couple of seconds, a perfect sphere, reflecting and refracting its surroundings beautifully. Due to the dryness of the air surrounding the soap bubble, and the pull of gravity, the bubble eventually bursts. It was almost as if the bubble had never existed. The Dutch vanitas artists of the Golden Age likened the existence of life to the everyday phenomena of the soap bubble, and now with superior knowledge of the universe we can draw more comparisons. From looking at the universe, we have discovered that life has only inhabited a tiny portion of the entirety of time and space, and is therefore incredibly precious. Alike the soap bubble, life exists for a (relatively) short amount of time, before it pops out of existence.

The idea of “life as a bubble” holds weight in contemporary cosmological theory, scientists often compare cosmological happenings to bubbles and foam. This idea spans from inflation theory, to multiverse theory — the idea that the universe exists as one bubble amongst a sea of cosmic foam. In the constellation Cassiopeia, there sits a Bubble Nebula which measures over six light-years across, having been blown by cosmic winds. This idea extends to quantum science relating to the birth of the universe, as some scientists believe that the universe exists as a quantum fluctuation from nothing, something that can be compared to the act of watching the soap bubble emerge and then disappear within a matter of seconds.