Random Science

2/12/2021

What Would Happen if You Try To Catch a Baseball Travelling at 1,000 Miles Per Hour?

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I have previously posted a video where Destin and his crew from the YouTube channel SmarterEveryday built a supersonic baseball cannon. In the video below they use the cannon to shoot a baseball at a boxing mannequin, and they try to catch the ball with baseball gloves. See what happens!

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9/12/2020

Supersonic Baseball Cannon

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Some pitchers can pitch a baseball at speeds upwards of 100 miles per hour. The fastest pitch recorded in Major League Baseball in the 21th century was pitched by Aroldis Chapman while playing for the Cincinnati Reds. The pitch was clocked at 105.1 miles per hour. In the video below, Destin, from the YouTube channel SmarterEveryday builds a baseball cannon capable of shooting baseballs at supersonic speeds (above 700 miles per hour). Back in 2001, former Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson throwing a baseball at nearly 100 miles per hour disintegrated a bird that flew into it in a puff of feathers. Destin shoots the baseball at two inch thick sheets of steel, but you can pretty much imagine from the results what such a pitch would do to a baseball bat or a catcher!

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6/1/2019

Watch Me Break the Sound Barrier With a Towel

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When an airplane flies, it pushes the air molecules in front of it creating a compression wave. As the airplane travels faster, the air molecules are pushed together further and further forming more densely packed compression waves. In the early days of modern aviation, planes approaching the speed of sound were battered by these compression waves bad enough that they could be torn apart. This led to the notion that there was a “sound barrier” that prevented flight at speeds faster than sound. Although these problems were eventually overcome with better airplane design (which allows some planes nowadays to fly at several times the speed of sound), the name “sound barrier” stuck. Thus when an object accelerates past the speed of sound, many people refer to it as breaking the sound barrier.

When the airplane hits the speed of sound (770 miles per hour) the compression waves merge with one another and create a shock wave which people on the ground hear as a very loud noise called a sonic boom. But you don’t have to fly a plane to generate a sonic boom. This can be done with a whip. The sound that is produced when a whip cracks is the sonic boom produced when the tip of the whip exceeds for an instant the speed of sound. However, using a whip properly requires some practice. As it turns out you can use a regular towel to generate a sonic boom. Most people do this by wetting the towel, rolling it up, and snapping it like a whip, which again requires some preparation and practice. But you can also do it like I demonstrate in the video. Hold a dry towel close to the edges, and flip it upwards and then downwards very fast with a curved motion. The edge of the towel will break the sound barrier and generate a loud crack (sonic boom). I have included a section in the video slowed down to 240 frames per second to better visualize the acceleration of the edge of the towel and the generation of the sonic boom.

If you try this, please be mindful of safety. Flip the towel above your head away from your eyes (tilt your head down, don’t look at the towel while you are flipping it), and wear some protection in case the edge of the towel comes in contact with your head.

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rANDOM sCIENCE

What Would Happen if You Try To Catch a Baseball Travelling at 1,000 Miles Per Hour?

Supersonic Baseball Cannon

Watch Me Break the Sound Barrier With a Towel

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