The theory of bubble dynamics was started in 1917 by Lord Rayleigh during his work with the Royal Navy to investigate cavitation damage on ship propellers. Over several decades his work was refined and developed by Milton Plesset, Andrea Prosperetti, and others. The Rayleigh–Plesset equation is:
where  is the bubble radius,  is the second order derivative of the bubble radius with respect to time,  is the first order derivative of the bubble radius with respect to time,  is the density of the liquid,  is the pressure in the gas (which is assumed to be uniform),  is the background static pressure,  is the sinusoidal driving pressure,  is the viscosity of the liquid, and  is the surface tension of the gas-liquid interface.