Very interesting.
But can you make anything useful out of that ultra-strong glass? Can something similar be made from other materials? Solving mysteries is nice, but without some practical benefit, it is not much more than a mind game (I could call it something else, but I’m trying to be polite).
Go look up YouTube videos showing them shattering. Fascinating. People have gone so far as _shoot_ the drops, recorded with high-speed cameras, showing the bullet fragmenting on the glass and the glass surviving unscathed until the shockwave reaches the drop’s tail.
I wonder if there might be a way to avoid the tail and create a very strong glass bearing.
Maybe by releasing the molten glass in zero G and somehow surrounding it with water quickly?
There has to be a way to harness this knowledge to create a nearly impenetrable surface. There has to be....
This is an allegory/riddle.
Can be hit on the head with out any effect.
But tweak the tail, and everything shatters.
What/who am I?
Finally, I can sleep tonight.
The process of makin Price Rupert’s Drops is sort of like making Fried Marbles, except you don’t heat them until they’re molten. Always wear goggles or safety glasses. In making fried marbles you take pretty swirl pattern marbles, place them in a skillet or other suitable vessel and heat them to 400 - 500 degrees. Then, using a pair of tongs, drop them into ice water. The glass will instantly develop all sorts of crazy stress cracks internally in the marbles, making their translucent patterns even more interesting.
Prince Rupert was a first cousin to King Charles II—his mother was a daughter of James VI&I. The region drained by Hudson’s Bay used to be called Prince Rupert’s Land—now divided between several Canadian provinces and the Northwest Territories, but a small part is in the US.
This just gets at the ridiculousness of Metric measures.
The metric unit for force is a Pascal. This is a stunningly small amount of force. One Newton per Square Meter. So, one atmosphere of pressure which for most people is not a very familiar measure (kind of like a furlong per fortnight) is equal to 101,000 Pascals. This is why Mega-Pascals are used for many situations needing to be described in the “real world” however, this unit kind of sucks for that purpose too.. because 1 Megapascal = approx. 145 psi. So your normal water pressure in your pipes should be 80 psi or less. That is .5517 Megapascals. Arrg. Or 552 Kilopascals. Argg again. The concept was to avoid conversion constants in basic units.. but this is a hopeless idea. What you get is a series of wrong sized units that are not practical for human usage. So you still end up multiplying and dividing and applying many more conversions.
Science designed by a committee and enforced by the mouth of a gun. One wonders if the whole global warming hoax would have been possible without the forced introduction of Metric units to make people unable to estimate anything but the most basic units in their heads. When we get to beams and strength of materials this issue makes the most brilliant scientist liable to huge errors due to slipped decimal places.
To get a quick idea of this problem.. it would seem that 8 chicken feathers would produce about 1 pascal of force on sensitive enough scale. But, this might be in error.. because these calculations need to be worked at e-5 scales. A chicken feather is 0.0082 grams approx. So, a 9.8 Meters per second squared conversion might be needed to convert grams into newtons. Fun. Yes. this was designed by the French to be easier. SO my question is 0.8 chicken feathers? 8 chicken feathers or 80 equal to one pascal?
They may have quantified it better, but I have seen this principle explained on numerous you tube videos, where people have actually shot the head of them with bullets and broken the tails with special cameras so that you can see what happens.
