Video of the Week: Glass Explosion at 343,000FPS! - The Slow Mo Guys (by The Slow Mo Guys)

The Slow Mo Guys (Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy) has wowed us for many years by showing us a whole new world. They have smashed up computers, TVs, and completely ruined Dan’s laboratory coat, all in the name of slow motion.

Five years ago, they released the video of Gavin attempting to pop a giant red balloon with no success until he grabbed the help of his brother. They both jumped on the balloon together and it popped spectacularly as well as drenching the entire garden. The video went viral within moments, even capturing the attention of TV networks who wish to show the video as part of their science programs. As of writing this article, the video has 142,657,322 views – the most viewed video on their channel. That’s the video that brought them into the spotlight, and their popularity hasn’t stopped growing ever since.

Five years on, and they have released plenty more entertaining videos. They have done many experiments just to see what the outcome would look like in slow motion, and it is always completely unexpected. It’s fascinating to watch how paint forms incredibly colourful patterns when being flung into the air, water drops doing what you never though they would do.

Their newest video as of writing this article, is the most ambitious yet in terms of speed. 343,000 frames per second, which is, staggeringly, 13,756 times slower than real time. They are opening that world to show us what glass looks like when breaking. We all know that glass breaks at a tremendous speed, and so it’s understandable why they need to use an advanced camera with mind-boggling speeds to capture that moment, but even then, at those speeds, the glass still breaks unexpectedly fast.

They did a comparison shot of water falling into Dan’s eye and his eye closing at the speed of a human reaction, and the drop appears to be stationary, yet the cracks running through the glass still appeared to be too fast for us to properly analyse. Just how fast does glass break? Well, some of you probably already know that answer, but I had to find that out for myself and so I did a bit of research and I discovered that glass breaks faster than 3000MPH. If you were to try and capture that event with 6000FPS, the time it takes for the glass to be complete to fully cracked would happen in just one frame.

This video isn’t just to show you what glass looks like when breaking, but also to show you just what glass is truly capable of when doing so. Once the glass has cracked and broken into the pieces that’re ready to spread as far as possible, when filming with a framerate of over 300,000FPS, the glass then looks as stationary as the water droplet does. I felt I had to mention that because I am truly blown away by it all. It’s a whole new way of seeing what happens all the time.

It’s possible to go faster. It’s possible to record things over 500,000FPS, and even higher. It’s only a matter of time when The Slow Mo Guys get hold of a camera that can do that, and when they do, what new reality will they present to us that time round?

It’s also worth to mention their second fastest video, which is when they recorded a CD spinning and shattering at 170,000FPS. That, too, allowed us to see strange things happening. The CD’s warp spinning slower than words on the CD is the reason why it broke – I thought that the warp would spin just as fast as the CD, but apparently not. Who knew?

UPDATE:
In the video, they joked about uploading the entirety of the 19 and a half hour video onto their second channel. I didn't think they would actually do it, but they did, and you can view the appropriately named video: The Longest 5 Seconds on YouTube.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)