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As a patron, what questions would you want answered on a followup video? Obviously I'm going to hit it with a higher caliber.

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Patrick W. Gilmore

Angle of attack seems relevant. You mostly hit it from the side. What about straight on? Might be difficult with strings, but I trust you are a good marksman. =) Also, different types of stress - i.e. torque, sheer, sharp objects (a bullet is quite blunt - relatively), etc.

Anonymous

Could you hit the drop with a bullet in air (this would be difficult to do) to test if it is the shock from the bullet or the reaction force by the string on the tail that causes the drop to shatter?

Anonymous

maby a hit to the tale

Anonymous

It looked to me like hanging it from 2 strings increased the pressure on the tail. Is there any way to hang it from 1?

Anonymous

Is it possible to make a prince rupert's drop /without/ the long tail attached at the end?

Anonymous

what is the max strength? Could you get access to a hydraulic press and measure at which point it breaks? Is this even possible without causing the tail to vibrate and shatter? Can you design the glass so that the tail is farther away from the bulb to make this possible?

Anonymous

Put it on a speaker and vary the frequency to try and get it to shatter

Greg Strike

How short can that tail be? It's possible a shorter tail could prevent it from shattering because there would be less leverage.

jeff fearnow

I think the the only way to see one without a tail is to do it in microgravity- the whole blob-to - water transit in gravity inherently creates a tail.

Greg Strike

Also, I wonder if the drop could be supported by one string, tied in a loop, so that the drop's tail hangs down. This could help limit outside forces on the fragile tail.

Anonymous

I am really curious on how much the shape is affecting the path. Could you shoot a tempered glass sphere or glass with a similar geometry as a control?

Barmp

Could you reenforce the tail in resin or something to try and prevent the vibration from destroying the drop? I imagine you might blow the thing up just trying this but it would be interesting if it cured.

Anonymous

previous comments might hint at it, but let me try to be clearer: the bullet accelerates the drop. That puts quite some stress on the tail because of the acceleration of the entire structure. The drop that survived the first video was relatively short and had a stubby tail, right? Not sure how to test this as any kind of weight attached to the drop will increase the force to accelerate it...

Barmp

I'd also love to see various ammo types in an air rifle try this out. Lower velocity but if you're able to use materials like porcelain or ceramics you might see an interesting result too.

Anonymous

What if you took one of the drops with a fairly straight tale and shot the drop itself from an air cannon? That would be pretty exciting.

jason black

More about crack propagation speed. Do they all shatter at about the same speed? Is there a difference in speed vs. the type of glass involved?

Anonymous

I wanted to see you try a higher caliber but since you're already going to do that, I'm happy.

Anonymous

Use ballistics gel? Could be interesting.

Nathanael Mayo

One thing that I think may be interesting is to see if you could get a head on angle, down range. Such as putting a mirror as a background to the Prince Rupert's Drop, copying what you did in Day 136. Don't know if you would get much more information than what you already have attained, but might be interesting.

Joseph Catrambone

It seems that the shockwave breaking the tail is the singular reason for the drops breaking. Would it be feasible to suspend the tail in a block of ballistic's gel to dampen the pressure wave? I'd speculate that doing so would make the drops neigh invulnerable.

Anonymous

I thought the same, but looks like its been done before with very high frame rate footage <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRUngxK2yXY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRUngxK2yXY</a>

Anonymous

I agree and would also love to see it in a way that minimizes the breaking of the drop because of the tail wagging. Do you think that almost all of the drop inside the gel, but at least half of the head protruding from the gel? Then we would still have a full impact on the drop.

Anonymous

What if you encase the drop (up to half the head) in a hard material? Molten aluminum maybe? (I don't know how the drop would behave when heated, but I am assuming that since it was forged with heat it might be OK). That could transfer the acceleration from the head to the metal, protecting the tail and maybe giving the drop a higher survival rate.

Anonymous

I think getting more consistent shots by limiting or restricting the rotation of the drop could be helpful. In the original, you were having to time the shot based on the free-movement of the drop suspended from the string ending up with inconsistent drops. Even the shot where the tail was tethered, it still had some movement.

Anonymous

Can you make a sphere? And, can you dampen then shock to the tail, in an attempt to increase survive-ability of the drop? What if you cured the drop in oil, or some quenching medium that didn't boil on contact with molten glass?

Emma

Replicating the resin encased drop you talked about in the second channel video would be great!

Emma

And it may show some great unexpected things on the high speed.

Anonymous

Also intrigued by the shockwave propagating through the drop tail... It would depend on the vibration modes of that tail, and therefore on its thickness and length... There's a paper in there

Anonymous

I'd like to see both methods of drop destruction explored more. As others have said, I think it would be really interesting to suspend the tail in some vibration - dampening material (gel? resin?) to get a better read on the force required to break the drop at the head. On the flip side, I'd like to see if it's possible to break the drop via pure vibration (sound waves?) if it resonates correctly with the tail. Looking forward to whatever you do!

Anonymous

He mentioned that in the video that the bullet isn't actually breaking the drop. The tail vibration is. Though there is at least one in the video on the second channel where the bullet actually shatters it.

Anonymous

Does a prince rupert's drop contain enough potential energy to cause cavitation if it was broken underwater?

Dre

As mentioned in your second channel, please specify if you use higher or lower quality drops. Does the type of air bubbles in higher quality drops affect shatter/no shatter? What causes the variety of air bubbles?

Anonymous

Can a Prince Ruperts drop work without the tail? As you are pouring out the molten glass can you take some scissors or shears and cut off the trailing tail so that you end up with a blunt blob or something close to a sphere? will it still have the same properties? where will it fail if it has no tail? would it be possible to work with a glass blower to sculpt a sphere and then knock that sphere off their mandrel into some water? does this only work with a small drop or can you send a big glob of glass into the water and get something similar?

Anonymous

I would also wish to see a direct hit from the front. Is it possible to make a prince rupert drop that is straight? Apart from the last video i would like to see the differences of wing profiles between subsonic and hypersonic. My mechanic teacher says that it is like to dive into a parallel universe...

Anonymous

What does the fracture at the tail look like? Also 12 guage slug?

Logan West

I love these comments :) And the video was awesome Destin, looking forward to whatever followup is made.

Anonymous

Do the vibrations through the drop itself cause the chain reaction shattering? Does it vibrate itself apart, or is it because it is suspended near the tail (providing a new vibration mode?) that causes it to shatter?

Anonymous

Does any energy from the bullet push the PRD horizontally? Or does the hardness itself (plus the inertia of it wanting to stay at rest?) cause the bullet to shatter? I'm basically trying to figure out if someone was just holding the PRD by the tail and it was shot, what would they feel in their hand?

Anonymous

How would this work if it was scaled up? Consider a cannon ball shot into a PRD the size of a Toyota. :) It's always really interesting to me to see how different phenomena change with scale...

NuTTyX

I was thinking of the same. Loudspeaker + high frequency sounds.

Anonymous

Could we somehow dampen the vibrations of the tail to prevent explosion? What about hitting it with a steel core .223 round (green tip) assuming a PRT takes a .223 FMJ hit.

Anonymous

What if you hit it dead center between the tail and the head?

Anonymous

At 4 minutes in to the first video <a href="https://youtu.be/24q80ReMyq0?t=240," rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/24q80ReMyq0?t=240,</a> you have a drop which the tail shatters in a wave. When I watch the video closely it looks like the PRD's tail is wiggling as the failure front advances and the wave comes from that wiggle. Is that the case?

Anonymous

Hydraulic press. Nuff said.

Anonymous

Would it be possible to be more consistent with where the shot hits?

Anonymous

Since the vibration of the tail is what shattered most of the drops, what if you expose the drops to audio that causes glass to break? (e.g. making a wine glass shatter from a high pitch)

Anonymous

Just finished my degree in Physics Education. Can't wait to show my students all the incredible work you've done. Shots out to those amazing kids in Iquitos!

Anonymous

A checkerboard backdrop with a defined grid size would be useful for measurement, also ensure that the entire drop including the end of the tail is in view

Anonymous

a Calculation as to how fast the shockwave is moving through the tail of the drop, hitting the critical stress point, vs how fast the glass shatters from that point. Also, What happens if you protect the tail with some sort of energy dampening (rubber, foam, etc) How much force can the "head" of the drop take? (BIGGER GUNS!!!)

Anonymous

Could you shoot one underwater? you already proved that a bullet has little energy under water, but at short distances, it might be cool.

Anonymous

Like others I would like to see the tail dipped into various liquids water or oil.

Anonymous

I know water is pretty great as absorbing heat. Should the PRD be made by using a different liquid for the cooling, to see if there are changes in the tension.

Anonymous

I know water is pretty great as absorbing heat. Should the PRD be made by using a different liquid for the cooling, to see if there are changes in the tension.

Anonymous

I'd love to know whether you can make the drop without the long tail, to reduce the vulnerability that these have when they're exposed to shock.

Anonymous

Toss one in the air and get ol' Byron to tag it with an arrow

Anonymous

Is there a way to suspend the drop so that the vibrations of the bullet striking it are minimized, thus resulting in fewer shatters?

Anonymous

Point a laser into the head of the drop so that it travels down the tail like a fat fiber optic. Then shoot the tip of the tail to see if it illuminates the failure front along the way. Also, if you get bored, chain a few together head to tail.

Anonymous

Could you encase the tail in something to dampen the vibration?

Anonymous

Full. Metal. Jacket. Also solid metal penetrators like steel and tungsten.

Anonymous

If you shot it from the side more in the middle or towards the back of the teardrop part, would two waves propagate? Would it shatter from where you shot or would it have to reach back to the tail first?

Anonymous

Shooting different types of rounds at it, although that might get legally hairy pretty quickly. Somewhere on youtube is a PRD being crushed by a hydraulic press (dented the press tooling before breaking), but not very high speed film AFAIK. That would be interesting too, esp. with different size &amp; shape tooling. Maybe a big honkin' pneumatic cylinder with different things on the end too, might give more accuracy &amp; versatility than a projectile.

Anonymous

Test different muzzle velocities? Like the saying "speed beats armor", does a fast moving bullet penetrate better vs a large caliber slow moving bullet?

Anonymous

the hydraulic press video: <a href="https://t.co/a0O9wlmrYR" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://t.co/a0O9wlmrYR</a> It's 4000fps, I think you can see the tail wobble and shatter first... My guess is there was a 'jitter' in the press that vibrated the tail much like the bullet scenario, but it's hard to tell. I'm not sure if there's a way of compressing it smoothly to minimise jitter, and measure the force being applied to the bulb... It'd be really interesting to somehow quantify how much force can be applied to the bulb without causing the tail to jitter, and if it can be done smoothly enough, what the point of failure is then...

Austin Burnham

It seems like a compression wave hits the drop and that advances to the tail and breaks it. Could you attach something to the tip of the drop to absorb the kinetic energy from the bullet to avoid a pressure wave? I'm envisioning hanging the drop tail-up and shooting it from the side. Something attached to the other side would then shoot off, Newton's Craddle style.

Anonymous

Paul posted it but there are a few hydraulic press videos. Some of them are not quite slow enough but some insight on what is going on there would be interesting.

dm_nimbus

Not sure how you'd make this happen, but I'd love to see this happen in a vacuum or in a liquid medium

dm_nimbus

Well, I guess a pool might work for the second one. I tacked that on without thinking of the whole sentence.

Anonymous

Can the Prince Rupert's Drop be shattered by sound alone? i.e. Find the resonance frequency of the tail. Also, does leaded glass behave differently?

Anonymous

<a href="https://youtu.be/tRUngxK2yXY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/tRUngxK2yXY</a> is a follow up by the same crowd which is at a higher FPS and also seems to have a 'better' drop. But I would also be interested to see it done by SED.

Anonymous

Since my children and I use Smarter Every Day as a way to discuss science topics from demonstrations to experiments, I'd like to see more (and I do know about SED2) at the end of each of the official videos about what went wrong. I know it isn't specific to the prince rupert's drops, but I think it would be nice if at the very end of the video we got some sort of short, written statistical overview like "out of 51 drops, 5 shattered at the head and 55 shattered beginning from the tail. I missed one." Something to show that science demonstrations don't always do what we expect due to OTHER factors beyond what you're already illustrating - user error, flaws in the materials, outside interference. I've seen a little bit of those on your SED2, but it'd be nice to just have a corner of your end screen that mentions things don't always go right and pointing to where people can learn more. I know my kids have gotten disappointed a few times when they're trying to re-create a demonstration (thankfully not one of yours since they usually are pretty dangerous ;P) and it doesn't go the way they expect. They feel like they're just bad at science, instead of thinking through why they didn't get the expected result. I don't know if any of this makes sense at all. But they look up to you, so if you had a short snippet to show that even your demonstrations don't always go the way you expect, I know they'd be thrilled and it'd continually renew their passion to keep trying. And hey! It could link up to your SED2 for more in depth videos of the bloopers or behind the scenes.