THE VIDEO SHELF · whip crack shockwaves
How does a whip break the sound barrier? (Slow Motion Shockwave formation) - Smarter Every Day 207
Smarter Every Day uses high-speed and Schlieren photography to show how a whip crack is a supersonic shockwave formed at the tip. It references academic papers on whip physics.
Why HN readers recommended it
Recommended as the clearest footage of a whip tip going supersonic, and cited in shockwave discussions.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- SmarterEveryDay
- Topic
- whip crack shockwaves
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2019–2023
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
As mentioned by others, the photography technique looks like (and apparently is a software enabled variant of) Schlieren photography. This(1) is a neat example of an old school Schlieren set up capturing shockwave formation during whip cracks. I highly recommend it. (1) [VIDEO]
wolfram74 on Hacker News · 2019-03
In Nasa captures images of supersonic shockwavesFun fact, you can accelerate an almost-everyday object to supersonic speeds: whip tip [1,2]. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] (very much recommended)
nuccy on Hacker News · 2021-12
In Supersonic Trebuchet
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.