Can You Cut Glass Like Catwoman?

glass there are few objects in this universe that more clearly convey the idea of look but don't touch hey what if you want to touch something behind a pane of glass but you don't want to completely shatter this crystalline structure and what if you have one of these will this work or will we have to - the dreams of one particularly feisty feline femme fatale holy alliteration Batman now entering the facility as you can see I've been collecting assorted armaments and gadget re4 sometime now but one that has always caught my curiosity our Catwoman's glass cutting gloves they always seemed so simple so plausible miss Selina Kyle cool name miss Kyle had gloves tipped with some material that would allow her to quickly and easily cut holes in window panes and tantalizing museum displays but could it really be as simple as spin tap profit well let's head back to the facility and find out first of all the physics of cutting glass are fairly straightforward glass as a material mechanically speaking is very brittle meaning that it cannot bend or otherwise deform very much at all before those stresses overcome the strength of the material glass cutting takes advantage of this fact by forcing all of the forces to happen in a very specific place inducing a fracture right where you want don't forget to have your idea we we lost a lot of good people last year this is your standard glass cutter it's a relatively simple device essentially unchanged since its first design in 1869 nice you have a sturdy handle here and then you have a tiny tiny wheel up at the top this tiny wheel is actually the operative element here what it does is scratch or score the glass where you want to cut it now it doesn't look like much when you do this but it's enough because even tiny deformities in a material as brittle as glass can direct applied forces and then caused micro fractures that instantaneously spread into macro fractures and caused a big fracture right where you want it and cut a glass now glass cutters can only do this can scratch the glass because they are harder than the glass they are trying to cut now one way to classify the hardness the relative hardness of this wheel this material is with Mohs hardness scale first developed in 1812 it uses the harnesses of ten common materials and classifies them based on what can scratch something else one is the softest being talc and ten is the hardest being Diamond glass sits at a relative hardness of 6 or 7 and so all glass cutters have wheels that are harder than this whether that be from hardened steel or tungsten carbide or diamond coating my glass cutter here is hardened steel but is it hard enough to cut like Catwoman humans have figured out a number of ways to make glass unnaturally but what about getting glass straight from Mother Nature herself the other day I was on a walk outside of facilities saying two meters away from everyone don't touch me and I found this this is not the pattern you see every day right there's a fractal-like pattern and some weird shiny material what I believe we're looking at here is the site of a direct lightning strike on the sidewalk electricity radiated out from the impact site and then created Lichtenberg figures it heated up the concrete and the silica in the concrete to create this shiny material which is now effectively natural glass you can actually find something similar when lightning strikes of beach when a bolt of lightning hits the sand on the beach it creates a tube of glass where the lightning bolt will is transferred through creating what's called full Buren you can find that on a beach but to find that on a wall for a city that's just awesome stay back the proper way to cut a pane of glass begins with safety that's why I have high protection I have hand protection I have a sheet laid out to catch any shards of glass and it's why I'm not using tempered glass because that would more or less explode when I try to cut it and just for visibility sake I'm also using ring lights because it makes it look like I have to pubes anyway to cut a pane of glass what I'm going to do is lay this nice and flat on my surface I'm then gonna take my glass cutter I'm gonna have it 90 degrees from the pane of glass the way it's laying down and then I'm gonna press with a lot of pressure which I see being a problem with my fingers layer with a lot of pressure and then I'm going to score or scratch a line where I want all the forces to be focused I'm then going to apply some pressure and break the glass along that score mark it's not really glass cutting as it is glass breaking so I'm going to put this down now with some pressure I'm going to score when you hear the ripping sound it means it's working there we go I'm gonna try this on a single score just like that and you can see small line and so now I'm going to press with a little bit of pressure and just like that we cut some glass now that's a traditional glass cutter working like a glass cutter should but what about a glass cutting glove here is my Catwoman glove and hook it is five glass cutters attached to a safety glove again for safety aria help me do this she doesn't have hands but she sure has needles so many needles anyway this is awesome but I do see some potential problems right off the bat the biggest being that I think it's harder than you think to make a circle and maintain that circle with your fingers under a lot of pressure with straight blades like this when I'm pressing with the full force of my bodyweight more or less I don't know if I'm gonna be able to make an actual circle a single symmetrical score like we want but I guess there's nothing left to do but stabilize this pane of glass like I would a museum display or a window on some sandbags then give it a go okay so here we go i have my stabilized pane of glass and to encourage myself to get through that pane of glass I have here 99% pure copper one pound of it oh and I'm Catwoman and I'm a thief and I want this copper I'm gonna put it behind this museum pane of glass that's displaying ingot of copper for some reason alright so here we go Catwoman technique test one with our glove a lot of pressure here we go okay one thing you you can't stop me Batman I'm getting that copper ooh okay one more time give me that Cup okay so that's how that's not nearly as easy as it looks in most bat media what do we do I think we need to change our technique such that it gives the technique itself the biggest chance of working and removes the maybe human variable and maybe just think to yourself what would a materials scientists do glass is obviously transparent but that depends on what you're looking for right now your brain is looking for visible light to interpret as an image and visible light passes right through this pane of glass but what about invisible light now you're looking at me as I am in infrared light the heat radiation that is coming from my body now let's check if that glass is so transparent it's not at all in fact glass is very opaque to IR radiation this is no longer a window it's a wall the logical extension of this knowledge is of course if you're ever being hunted by the predator find a greenhouse okay so I have a new technique my suspicion is that this glove is not really gonna work it's not going to be rigid enough to keep all of my fingers perfectly circular I don't even think my fingers can really do that so what I want to do is try to prove woman's technique I'm gonna do what I did before to easily break the pane of glass I'm going to as best I can score out a circle and then since I didn't even get a nice score last time I didn't even have to tap it I'm gonna tap it really hard after making my very best circle on this pane of glass and if that doesn't work we'll try something else I'm gonna slap it with my multi-tool with a very fine point we'll see if that works so here we go Oh Batman Oh get it give me that copper there we go already much better and I'm pressing a lot harder than I was able to before man I can't see any way of doing this just naturally with your hands and remember we're using very very thin glass we're not using something like skyscraper glass because these are just not made to cut that if Catwoman's cutting that I don't just I just don't think that works okay so I have a circle scored out just like how we scored out the lines that broke here so in theory this should work if it is to work at all so now I'm going to stabilize and I'm gonna tap like Catwoman give me that cuppa Batman hey give me that copper huh okay so something happened here so as you can see it broke along the line of the glass but not all the way around I wonder if there is a little bit better scoring that we could get an actual punched out hole of glass so I'm going to quickly reset and I'm gonna try something a little bit different okay so this is my final idea I still have my stabilized pane of glass and what I'm gonna do to give this technique the best chance of working again I'm going to score out a circle as best I can and then I'm also going to score the inside of the circle with multiple lines giving this more failure points such that when I tap on it like Catwoman it will hopefully break along those lines and not anything else so here we go give me that copper copper I'm pressing so hard so now I'm going to score the additional lines okay nothing to do but to try hey Batman give me that copper oh so close so you can see that it did again break along the circle and along our lines but didn't create just a nice punch out so I have one more pane of glass I'm gonna try this one more time before I alert the authorities okay last chance for this to work let's try our technique again because it seemed like it had the most success out of everything that we tried so far okay so here we go score circle let's try a large one larger circle I'm guessing has a better chance oh I feel good about this one Batman okay now I'm also going to score out our lines like we did before and one more okay I think if anything is going to work it's going to be something like this alright Batman give me that copper your big silent type guy what no way okay I am flesh leveraging this before okay so I've tested this a number of times on an off-camera and this has never worked like this so so what I'm gonna do now is very carefully I'm going to grab if I wasn't doing with this with a glove I would be sliced up that's probably why Catwoman wears that suit oh yes the copper I was so ready to totally write this off but I guess if you could perfectly score the glass in a circle as symmetrically as you could and maybe you gave it a little bit something extra and then you hit it very hard with a very fine point it can in theory work will it work with a glove I don't know I think we kind of have to give Selina Kyle cool name the benefit of the doubt there because you have to push with a lot of force and have perfect coordination but she's very very coordinated in what she does as a thief and a super villain and I got my copper so I guess I guess this is possible but I'm keeping this glove until next time thank you so much the very nerdy facility faculty for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this video today especially I want to shout out Jurado Marion and Arya Foster hey cool name if you want to become a part of the facility if you want to join our patreon and our discord were right now literally hundreds of professors and visiting scholars and research assistants are talking with each other setting up their own D&D games remotely in these weird times and giving me episode ideas you can go to the link to the patreon in the description below and if you support just enough you'll get your name on re here and there's there's more and more of you each day so I'm just gonna I'm gonna dance this what out for a second hope nothing weird happens while I'm gone you have a few moments now what I was trying to tell you about before look behind the restricted door in the labs re are you saying something no well everybody science videos today for a nerdier tomorrow thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 622,404

Rating: 4.9119501 out of 5

Keywords: kyle hill, because science, the facility, batman, catwoman, science, comics, engineering, physics, math, how to, how to cut glass, how to cut mirror, DC, DC comics, learning, stem, glass cutter, kyle hill channel, glass cutting

Id: iraMAEoZXGk

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020