Making a supersonic steel whip did NOT go well

wow that was pretty cool and that guy's dang handsome but some might say not cool enough you see in that video i promised you a steel bullwhip that wouldn't only break stuff it would literally break the sound barrier and i did not follow through on that promise i blame arya you did the math pretty boy well all that changes today because we're headed back to the facility right now to do it right behold my super sonic steel bullwhip oh don't worry it'll look cooler when i whip it and it's much longer than it looks trust me now entering the facility the bullwhip was likely the first human-made object to break the sound barrier before bullets before rocket cars before jets and as we went through before a whip can do this by taking advantage of a tapered shape and kinetic energy so when you whip it and whip it good some wave of motion of kinetic energy travels down the whip but because of that tapered shape the mass of each part of the whip is decreasing to keep the total amount of energy the same ignoring friction and air resistance for a second the corresponding velocity according to the kinetic energy equation has to go way up and with a good whip crack you can get that velocity push past 343 meters per second in regular air which is the sound barrier and mach 1. now we went through all of this but in the video i wasn't able to do that with a big steel whippy whip and many of you sent me this video so you know it's possible to do just that i just didn't do it okay so today we will be going back working with my weapons master and getting it done getting the job done but first we gotta go through some science in the previous video we talked about how to break the sound barrier with something like a whip but not why breaking that barrier has any sound or boom associated with it well let's start by visualizing sound waves from a physics perspective the air that you're breathing now actually acts like a fluid and so you can imagine that any disturbance in that fluid will produce some ripples going outwards in all directions like throwing a pebble in a pond this is just particles bumping into each other and we call this bumping a moving pressure wave these pressure waves travel at the speed of sound by definition in whatever medium that they're in in air where the particles are relatively far apart that speed of sound is about 340 meters per second over 700 miles per hour if you get the particles closer together like in water the speed of sound is much much faster almost five times faster if you get the particles much much closer together like in a solid like steel the speed of sound is even faster still almost four miles per second now when these pressure waves emanate outwards they eventually vibrate the air which vibrates your eardrum or tympanic membrane your brain transduces these vibrations into electrical signals and you interpret these electrical signals as sound but what about all this makes a sonic boom so special as we said sound waves in a medium can only travel at the speed of sound in that particular medium a property of particle parameters a sonic boom is loud because of this speed limit imagine an object starts moving and then makes a sound because the sound waves can only travel so fast they will tend to get closer together in the direction of motion as the object gets closer and closer to the speed of sound itself at or above the speed of sound the sound waves can't get out of the way quick enough and this is where you get a wave of concentrated pressure this big wave of concentrated pressure is what creates the boom of a sonic boom so you see at the tip of a whip traveling faster than the speed of sound the regular whipping noises get in effect amplified and turned into that characteristic crack what's cracking kyle nice is the chain ready why else would i be calling oh yeah i don't have any friends so why would you be okay i'll be right there can a calculator be a friend i have those given that this iteration of the chain whip is going to involve kyle swinging it around above his head it seemed like a wise precaution to add a handle to help with his grip as well as a little horizontal plate for extra finger protection you can see that i added a little spine to the joint to enhance the structural integrity and i chamfered all the edges for extra finger safety this whip is going to be dangerous enough without having razor sharp edges as well this chain is made up of mild steel so the fabrication process consisted of some pretty straightforward cutting grinding and mig welding to put this all together i mean that is if you consider playing around with 8 000 degrees fahrenheit straight forward that's enough metal magic and sparks for now let's head back over to science thor and see how this thing really works okay so what you'll notice during these attempts is this looks really dangerous you can actually see it hit the wood here which loses a lot of energy i'm not getting what i want notice how i'm protecting both my hair and face the former more so than the ladder i don't it's the hair that's important and this is the attempt i started thinking there was something going wrong watch the chain right here before it gets all the way to the end it hits me directly in the back of the leg and then makes sparks on the ground that hurt okay something is going wrong i i don't know if i can fix this oh yeah so here's the thing um i wasn't actually able to get the chain to break the sound barrier i know i know i know what the title says please don't click away you'll get to see me hurt myself if you want to see that and i want to go through kind of how experiments fail and what we can learn from them and what i think is actually going on here so if you really want to see like the raw footage of what happened here you go [Music] yeah that's not just emotional pain on my face that's physical pain as you can see here i got a whip shaped bruise going all the way around my leg where you see it get hit even though i was wearing all the safety equipment that i could put on from adam savage's apron to eye protection to face protection all that i still got width in the leg a number of times and hurt myself pretty good and i thought i was making the motion correctly but it just did not work but cow we sent you this guy cracking a steel chain whip a number of times than you kind of did in the previous video what gives well that's what i thought too when i was looking back at what we did in the slow motion footage that thea took why did this go wrong well look at this tick tock footage a little bit closer if you slow it down at just the right part there it looks like the rest of this shirtless dude's chain isn't actually chain it looks like he has some sort of leather or other fabric whip on the end of his whip that would make it a more traditional whip and give it a great whip crack now i try to replicate the shape and the motion of this chain as best as i could and even though you can see sparks fly when it hits the ground i don't really get that pop that sonic boom that i was looking for i mean look how many times i tried this so yes i wasn't able to get exactly what i wanted to get out of this video but i still wanted to show it to you because so much of what you see online and in videos is so curated so perfect and sometimes so fake i wanted to show you what failure looks like i still got a very dangerous chain that could have whipped stuff up but i wanted to stop to be safe and i think there was other things going on and when you see this failure happen we can step back for a second look at our own experiment re-evaluate what went wrong what went right was i whipping it right was the chain the right length i want to show you that i failed at this even though it is theoretically possible i wasn't able to do it and i wouldn't advise you to do it either just because you see something on the internet does not mean it's easy super possible or safe just like in scientific papers on youtube and other science videos there is a success bias there's a bias to show only the times where something was correct and spectacular and never show you the failures or the misses i mean yes otherwise you don't get a bunch of views and make a bunch of money but i wanted to salvage some part of this video and get to some kind of learning experience with it so even though you didn't quite get what you were looking for i hope you learned something until next time i i don't know what else to tell you really now exiting the facility thank you so much the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially on a recognized research assistant sam rachelson and visiting scholar zolrok entity of the 9th dimension if you want to join the facility if you want to drape a silky white lab coat over your shoulders if you want to continue this conversation on discord you want to see videos early you want members only live streams not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the facility today and as you can see if you support us just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the okay but seriously uh don't try this two things really heavy you can you can you can pull something and two uh what you're not seeing in a lot of the videos of this or in the footage that i'm showing you of this is that uh you kind of have to dodge the whip as it passes your feet and uh it's very heavy and it hit my foot once and good thing i was wearing shoes with soles that came up high enough or else stay safe thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 389,262

Rating: 4.9084387 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, diy whip, whip, bullwhip, steel, supersonic, diy, making

Id: wuERuj_8vnY

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021