Mystery of Prince Rupert's Drop at 130,000 fps - Smarter Every Day 86

1. Drop molten glass in a bucket of water. 2. Let it cool down, take it out. 3. Hammer the head of the drop and it won't break. 4. Nick the thin tail and the whole thing will explode . Here's a GIF - [LINK] Here's the vid - [VIDEO]

Also discussed and illustrated in "The Curious Properties of a Molten Glass Blob Dropped in Cold Water" [LINK] The story linked is just a blog wrapper on a "Smarter Every Day" episode, which is definitely worth watching. Smarter Every Day: [VIDEO]

You'd just see some blinding white light for a few seconds and then maybe nothing else for the rest of your life. Our human eyes and brains limit us from perceiving even everyday things with the majesty they deserve. Even popping water balloons looks amazing in high speed video. On YouTube, there is a community of people doing silly things with high speed cameras that makes for stimulating watching: Smarter Every Day: weird glass phenomenon [VIDEO] Smarter Every Day: cat righting itself in midair [LINK] Lots of high speed videos [LINK]

The Smarter Every Day YouTube channel has done several high-speed videos about Prince Rupert's drops, including a couple released just last week. * 2013-03-22 [VIDEO] * 2016-12-29 [LINK] * 2017-04-26 [LINK] * 2017-04-30 [LINK]

Interesting. I love glass blowing. Maybe I'll learn about it some day. Borosilicate and aluminosilicate cookware is actually pretty tolerant of chipping, because pieces tend to be thoroughly annealed. Tempered soda-lime, on the other hand, is not, so it has tremendous internal stress that makes it much tougher than borosilicate, but once it does chip it's liable to shatter explosively. Like Prince Rupert's drops. Hey, you want to see something cool? You'll appreciate this since you work with the stuff. Go to 2 min 45 sec in the video at [VIDEO] . High speed video of one of these things exploding. Kinda blew my mind.

wow, I literally just had a very similar idea but what inspired me to think of it was the phenomenon of Prince Rupert's Drops [VIDEO] I commented on the quantamagazine article but it's awaiting moderator approval

The strength that those stresses add is mind boggling. Smarter Every Day[0] did a video on Prince Rupert's Drops, which have similar internal stresses, and he demonstrates their strength by shooting a drop with a .22 rifle. [0] [VIDEO]

Shout out to Destin from SmarterEveryDay for his love of PRDs. Learn about and see how it’s made – [VIDEO] Encasing a shattering drop in glass – [LINK] The process the team uses in the second video to freeze the break in glass is pretty awesome! (If you’re into that kind of thing)

Unfortunately the link on the third post now seems to go to an SEO spam site, but the Web Archive seems to have the original - [LINK] which was a blog post featuring this YouTube video - [VIDEO]

> While the Superfest glass is by far more durable than normal glass, when they shatter – the burst into a million fine pieces and are a total nightmare to clean up. I’m not sure if it’s because of their potassium chloride coating or because they are made to be super thin, my advice is to not drop them. maybe the same reason [the super hard] prince rupert's drops explode. really high internal stress. [VIDEO]