how does this work?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5us-v4bntP8&feature=related

bubble rings, wut?

lrn2fluiddynamics

Think back to a time when your best buds and yourself were smoking. One of them (always the cool guy) says, "Hey, I know how to blow a smoke ring. Check this out!" So he proceeds to do just that. Everyone is like, "That's cool", but nobody asks how he did it. You're one of the people who knows how he did it and are just painfully unable to do it yourself. Okay. Now imagine you can. Blow a smoke ring, suspend it in mid-air for a second, observe how the net density of that smoke will soon even out with the air pressure inside that room. Now take these conditions, and let air change to water, smoke to air, and the recognizable shape of the smoke ring be a boundary between air and water, for which air is trapped for a short time in a large ring before being forcibly broken down into what are only subsets of its original cover.

In short, dolphins are better at physics than you are.

dolphins are stupid, only reason for this is chemicals in the water influenced by the zoo keeper.

>>3
Is it actually feasible to blow smoke rings with cigarette smoke? I've only ever managed it with cigars and pipe smoke.

>>5
I don't know, maybe there's a subtle trick to it.

>>5
Yes. I've even seen it done.

The smoke ring effect is from (as was already said) the fluid dynamics of the air. It is the movement of the air, not the chemical composition of the smoke particles that makes a smoke ring. The smoke particles are just a visual aide for seeing the vortex in the current of the air flow. Without the smoke, the rings would still be there, you just wouldn't be able to see them.

The bubble rings are the exact same thing, except the air bubbles are helping to visualize the vortex in the water currents.

However, I seem to remember my grandfather explaining that most major brands have certain chemicals to make the smoke disperse quicker, making it harder to blow rings with them. But that was over a decade ago with a shitty memory and I'm no expert besides, so take that with all the salt in the Pacific.

Okay, thanks to >>3 I realise that I'm just a  it dumb and not thinking hard enough.

Pretty cool to see dolphins "playing" though.