Surface tension gases. The pressure inside an ideal (one surface) soap bubble can be derived from thermodynamic free energy considerations. At constant temperature and particle number, , the differential Helmholtz energy is given by where is the difference in pressure inside and outside of the bubble, and is the surface tension. In equilibrium, , and so, For a spherical bubble, the volume and surface area are given simply by and Substituting these relations into the previous expression, we find which is equivalent to the Young–Laplace equation when . For real soap bubbles, the pressure is doubled due to the presence of two
Surface area lead to different limiting values of the area; this example is known as the Schwarz lantern. Various approaches to a general definition of surface area were developed in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century by Henri Lebesgue and Hermann Minkowski. While for piecewise smooth surfaces there is a unique natural notion of surface area, if a surface is very irregular, or rough, then it may not be possible to assign an area to it at all. A typical example is given by a surface with spikes spread throughout in a dense fashion. Many surfaces of this type occur