Has this been confirmed? The original channel also posted a comparison video [1] showing what seems to be the same cylinders tested against titanium and tungsten cubes (though it's difficult to be sure they are identical)
There's also footage from another channel [2] showing a Prince Rupert's Drop bursting at 20 tons with significant damage to both the steel plate and the press.
When was this article written? Last update is 2023 (so the title should at least reflect this) but down in the article talks about Gorilla glass by Corning as a novelty with possible future uses in smartphones.
Sent from a Gorilla glass smartphone with a corner almost broken ^^;
Prince Rupert's Drop is strong at compression but weak enough that your pinky finger can shatter it.
These 'hardness' stats are just marketing bullshit dressed up in barebones material science. They know most people haven't studied material science or understand what 'hardness' means.
And according to Wikipedia [1] the first commercial use of Gorilla Glass was the original iPhone in 2007, even if the name was officially coined in 2008
It reminds me of Cory docotorow's comment of something like 'there are 5 social media sites and everything is just copied from one another'
HN isn't immune either, given that karma provides 'rights to punish views and accounts' (downvoting). And it makes a great strategy to make a whole lot of socks with 520 karma, and selectively kill comments and stories you don't want.
I’m sure sock puppets and voting rings play a role, but “this link was interesting to a bunch of people on sites with some overlap in interests and demographics” seems a simpler and better explanation.
Would/does that actually work? Its been a while since I watched SED Destins video about it, so I dont remember if they experiment with that. But intuitively, heating the glass so non-uniformly that the tail would melt and the bulb remained solid enough to keep the internal stresses intact, wouldnt that steep temperature gradient within the crystaline structure cause the entire drop to break?
No, that's a classic misconception. People claimed that windows "flowed" because really old ones were thicker at the bottom, but that was just how some old window glass was made.
I think the basis of the claim is that glass doesn't have the same kind of phase transition that a crystalline solid would. It just sort of gradually becomes more liquid-like as you heat it.
Once I was stuck down a youtube rabbit hole of someone testing anti-tank portable launcher against increasingly thick ballistic glass. The conclusion was that no glass can resist anti-tank projectile. Maybe large enough Rupert's drop glass could?
