In what they call the slowest slo mo video they’ve ever done — a frame rate that produces 7 hours of footage from 4 seconds of recording time —Â The Slow Mo Guys are back with one of the most mesmerizing things I’ve ever seen: watching forces rip apart a CD at an astounding 170,00 frames per second.
The guys call this rotating the CD at “literally warp speed” because the high revolutions per minute imparted to the disk by the vacuum motor creates huge forces in the disk’s material. But why does it shatter so beautifully?
Imagine a ball swinging in a circle on a string. The tension in the string is providing the force that allows the ball to travel in a circle. However, increase the mass of the ball or the speed of rotation, and the string needs to provide a larger force to keep the ball circling. At some point, the forces will be come too much, the string will snap, and the ball will fly off along a tangent to the circle it was outlining.
This is basically what is happening with the CD. As the vacuum motor whirs away, at some rotational speed the force the material in the disk needs to provide to keep every bit of the CD spinning is too much for the material to handle. At that point, just one crack will liberate bits and pieces along tangent lines and into space.
Here’s my experience with the whole exploding CD deal. I run a computer lab at a community college. One day I hear a pop and a student jumps out of their seat. I come over to investigate and the CD drive is a mess. I call IT and tell them about it. They come in and pull the drive. After a little examination, they see that a tiny capacitor popped, causing the CD to wobble and disintegrate. A couple years later, I start reading how electronic companies were flooded with bad capacitors from over seas.
Here’s my experience with the whole exploding CD deal. I run a computer lab at a community college. One day I hear a pop and a student jumps out of their seat. I come over to investigate and the CD drive is a mess. I call IT and tell them about it. They come in and pull the drive. After a little examination, they see that a tiny capacitor popped, causing the CD to wobble and disintegrate. A couple years later, I start reading how electronic companies were flooded with bad capacitors from over seas.