TOM NODDY

I was in my hippie stage. It was tough for my father. First it was the long hair, then the bubbles.

I had to find a way to get off the streets because it was too windy. So I started organizing variety shows of street performers. I would rent a hall, cafe or bar so I could put on a show. I did that for years before the 'Tonight Show With Johnny Carson' heard about this odd thing I did with bubbles.

I was never very good at stopping crowds. I started blowing bubbles to attract people.

I've never blown an ugly bubble. Never. They're all beautiful. They're like jewels, transient jewels.

I have no time for a vacation.

We thought we completely understood bubbles when we were kids. But we didn't. Bubbles are these amazing things. It's just that people aren't paying enough attention.

I receive food stamps but I have never been on welfare.

There's never an ugly bubble.

At 20 years old, I was better at playing with toys than I was as a kid.

When I do the dodecahedron with the science audiences, I'll point out that I can only do three of the five forms with bubbles, since bubbles only join at three-way corners. The two I can't do are the ones that represent water and air. That always gets a big laugh from the mathematicians. They see the irony in it.

I ended up living on Crete for eight months. I picked olives and did house painting and got broke.

There is a dream on the street. I hear it constantly - finding a piece of land, raising food, building a house. I hear talk of hopelessness. The price of land, you know. Housing is impossible. They are trapped in a cycle. How can you ask for a job after you've been sleeping in the bushes all night?

On good days, I've done bubbles with as many as 38 faces - a row of pentagons, a row of hexagons, and another row of pentagons on bottom.

I had this memory of being with my aunt, who I loved, you know, and watching her blow some bubbles in sunlight, and my heart fluttered when I watched her.

I enjoy the beauty of the bubble, they're fluid and yet they have these geometric shapes so they do surprising things - two spheres become a single sphere - it's what bubbles do.

I needed to entertain myself at home nights... I got a jar of bubbles.

Bubbles are weird things. They're not fragile. They're infinitely flexible. They're not what we think they are.

I think the best thing about a bubble is that it pops and is gone. That is what makes it so precious.

There is a lot of science in bubbles. They are just like our weather system. The earth is, in effect, trapped inside a liquid sphere, the troposphere, where our weather forms. The bright colors on the outside of a bubble are just varying thicknesses of bubble, just like the varying thicknesses of clouds.

It's hard to blow an ugly bubble.

The mid '70s was the golden age. A lot of things were being born on the street then, and there was a lot of experimentation.

I was one of the poorest people in America.

Bubbles are one of the few things in life that we are allowed to break.

I'm just a guy entertaining people and telling the truth and teaching them science.

The reason bubbles are spherical is that a sphere is the smallest, most economical form possible to contain a given volume.