A man caught the moment in slow motion video that a piece of glass known as the Prince Rupert’s Drop withstood a bullet fired at close range.
Destin Sandlin, an engineer who has a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day, likes to experiment with trying to destroy the almost indestructible (unless its tail breaks off) tadpole shaped glass piece known as the Prince Rupert’s Drop.
Because of the way tension is distributed throughout the glass, the head of it can withstand extremely high stresses, such as hammer blows or Hydraulic presses, while it will normally the entire glass shatter if the tail is broken, or even just wiggled.
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Sandlin decided to shoot two different sized bullets at the drop at close range – a .22 Magnum ‘full metal jacket’ bullet and a .38 Special.
The .22 travels at 1,875 feet per second.
Sandlin fires the .22 Magnum at the glass drop, which is tied to a post so it can’t fly off.
‘What! What?’ he yells at the bullet fails to even make much of a scratch on the head of the glass.
HISTORY OF A PHYSICS PUZZLE
Prince Rupert of Bavaria (1619-1682), grandson of James I, brought the glass teardrops to Charles II as a gift.
Demonstrations of the stress of glass were introduced to England as a curious party trick.
In 1661, King Charles asked his personal scientific society, which later evolved into the Royal Society, to investigate.
No one could give Charles Il a satisfactory explanation of the extraordinary behaviour of how the trick worked.
One of the scientists investigating was Robert Hooke, who became famous for Hooke’s Law.
It was not until 1994 that scientists at Cambridge University and Purdue University in Indiana solved the puzzle.
Sandlin had torched off the drop’s long curly tail which, normally if touched, will shatter the entire piece.
‘They’re tougher than I thought,’ he says, as he watches the slow-mo playback of the glass head surviving a bullet.
He then takes out the larger gun and ammo, a .38 Special.
He shoots at the glass and as it flies off from the force of the bullet he yells, ‘No way! No way! Shut up!’
The spectacular slow-mo footage shows the bullet breaking upon impacting the glass head, but the glass head remaining perfectly intact.
It doesn’t even shatter when the force of the bullet sends the long tail wiggling.
‘That’s absolutely ridiculous,’ he says.
Sandlin speculates that perhaps this particular drop is even stronger than usual because there was no air bubble inside as their usually is.
‘That’s a special one,’ he says of the indestructible piece of glass.
The video, uploaded April 26, already has over 700,000 views.
Source: Bullets fired at Prince Rupert’s Drop does nothing | Daily Mail Online
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