Slow Mo Guys Capture Glass Mirror That Waves Like Water Before It Snaps
SMRTR summary
A hammer strike on a mirror leaves behind something unexpected: a frozen map of the glass's final moment, its cracks tracing the exact hills and valleys of the surface as it gave way. That's one of the remarkable discoveries from Gav Free of the Slow Mo Guys, who trained a Phantom TMX 7510 camera on mirrors and sheets of glass at frame rates reaching 875,000 frames per second.
What emerges is almost otherworldly. At the moment of impact, rigid glass behaves like the surface of a pond, flexing in slow, smooth waves before a single perfect circle of cracks races outward at the speed of sound. The force of the strike matters too. A harder blow sends ripples to the rim first, cracking the edges before the center.
Colored lights added to later tests transformed the destruction into something resembling, as Gav himself put it, a glass peacock falling apart. Science and spectacle, colliding at a fraction of a second.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to TechEBlog.
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