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How does a whip break the sound barrier? (Slow Motion Shockwave formation) - Smarter Every Day 207

SmarterEveryDay · 6.5M views · 2018-12-28 · 11:21

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Recommended as the clearest footage of a whip tip going supersonic, and cited in shockwave discussions.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2019–2023

Topics

Everyday physics & science demosFundamental physics
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schlieren photographysupersonicshockwaveslow motionphysics

What people said

nuccy · 2021-12 · Strong recommendation

Fun fact, you can accelerate an almost-everyday object to supersonic speeds: whip tip [1,2]. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] (very much recommended)

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wolfram74 · 2019-03 · Strong recommendation

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]

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maxbond · 2023-04 · Reference

Point taken. Thanks for the explanation, that helped me a achieve a deeper understanding & blew my mind. This animation of a tachyon goes well with your explanation: [LINK] If you look for it, you can observe this effect in the high speed Schlieren footage of a whip in this video [VIDEO] (you can skip to around 8 minutes) It starts to disturb the air, then the shockwave overtakes the disturbance, so you can observe them in the flipped order if you're in the sound universe.

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Sources

Video by SmarterEveryDay, played through YouTube.

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