The problem with this that they do this not with complete steel balls. Complete steel ball would transfer energy properly, meanwhile steel shell with some soft cement inside act as baloon with water and all that energy is just wasted during transfer.
True, I think they should've tried welding a vertical steel disk too. I mean at 90 degrees. Half disk on the top half on the bottom. I guess that'd have increased eficiency a lot. not like full solid spheres but better than their single steel disk
Maybe but you also noticed how steel reformed it's shape.. Hyneman said it's not that there is no energy, well there was too much of energy that material couldn't handle..
The type of Metal is the problem, either they need to use steel with a lot of chrome, or make them entirely out of chrome(very hard) or titanium or an alloy wich is much less plastic deformable and more dynamic. Did you ever drop a metal one of these toys? If they drop on Stone they bounce around a lot. The principle at work is elastic collision, and Steel is really shitty at this game with energys this high. Every bit of plastic deformation in the steel or cracks in the concrete weaken the principle at work. Inhomogen composite balls are a dump idea in the first place, if theyd be homogen it would be less of a prob.
A car barreling down a hill dropping a trail of frozen chickens behind it with a robotic turkey dancing on its hood is a scene I would have never thought I'd see.
This show was not just the most important formative years of my early teens, through to adulthood. But, it was also THE single most important entertainment and relieve during the worst parts of my depression, a depression that started at age 12 and clinically"ended" at age 33. This show is one of the absolute major reasons that I'm still alive. Seeing all these episodes finally being legally uploaded is so cool, emotional and amazing. This show not only educated me to love science, it not only saved my life, it inspired an entire generation to follow our dreams in life. However crazy they seemed, whomever told us to be careful. Thank for, forever, to everyone on this show. In front, and behind, the camera. You did something absolutely amazing :)
I also was battling thingz at the time and this show was a massive hand during that period. America Chopper, ghost hunters, storm chasers ,deadliest catch and even Man vs WIld, good old bear grylls whatever you say about him helped me get through. Amazing life altering shows back them=n, so grateful.
For those wondering how this happens (they never explained it) the force that the steel can withstand scales at a slower rate with thickness than the force that the steel increases by in weight per increase in size. The steel can't withstand all that force so it takes most of the energy into itself by deforming rather than moving (or transferring the "movement" to the next object)
That's how I see it too. The issue is material properties, not just scale. The correct terminology isn't "moving" though, its an impulse. The impulse is diminished by the energy being absorbed in the deformation of the material. Perhaps if they had solid chrome vanadium bearing ball steel, with amorphous metal layer on top they could achieve a working cradle. That would be a multi-million dollar investment though, if not a hundred million, so clearly not in the scope of a mythbusters project. Besides, the myth is busted anyway.
48:15 *notices all the wrecked watermelons* ... I get the impression that some footage didn't make it to the final cut. Hey, at least they had some fun at the end ;)
Seeing Grant on set... he had so much more to give the world. One shouldn't be overwhelmed by sorrow over loss. One should instead be happy over who he was, what he was, that he was, and to whom he was. And for the time that we got to to experience his fantastic personality. We will always miss him. 🥺
Honestly, when i saw that giant newtons cradle, my thought was "ohhhh that was a good Episode" I grew up watching the german dub of the show, but now as a more fluent english speaker i really love the original
Used to watch this show as a child. Looking back now as a mechanical engineer in my mid 20s, it's even more fun now that I understand the physics behind everything and can make my own predictions. Very grateful for this.
my 2 cents, I think contributing factor to the fact that the large scale cradle didn't work, apart from what has already been mentioned is that the supporting structure has to be 100% rigid and fixed. The way they hanged it off a crane would not allow even perfect balls to do the trick, as wobbling hanging steel frame just absorbs too much energy. I cannot see how they didn't see it.
We used to stamp steel downhole oil tools' serial numbers with a hammer and metal stamp kit. I would never sit there like they were at 14:00 watching the balls collide. Hardened metal can shatter and eject fragments at bullet speeds.
@@Auxius.Bearings fail all the time. They are also built for Hardness and that hardness gives them high resistance to wear, but are very brittle to impacts. Cracking them together like that is an impact.
@@MysterySemicolon I'll ask my brother that works at SKF, however I've never heard a bearing fail because of an impact- denting perhaps rendering them unusable, but exploding or catastrophically fragmentating could be a whole new mythbusters episode.
@@tooby98765 Yes, but i think the experiment was not really can it happen, it was more like is there a chance that it could ramdomly happen. So the result is probably not. :D
If the car was at its tipping point when the 2 men got inside and sat down behind the balance point, thus transferring extra weight to the rear, it was obvious that far more weight would be required onto the bonnet to achieve success
"Because the viral video was nothing but CGI." You don't say? I think one of the problems of later Mythbusters seasons was that they had essentially burned through all good myths and started going after viral videos/random stuff from TH-cam. While interesting to watch, it was clear from the very beginning that they would end up busting the vast majority of them, due to CG being used to fake everything. Mythbusters ended well, but it was clear that they were more or less creatively treading water at this point and that they wanted to move on.
One thing I learned a few years after this episode aired was that the shape of the contact points has a huge effect on how the energy is transferred. The reason is that a pure sphere has a very tiny point of contact through which all of its own energy is going out. When a secondary object also has such a minimal contact point, almost 100% of the energy is transferred. Of course, the rig itself and its setup are important as it also can absorb some of that energy. I might be wrong, but I think I learned this from Adam in a TH-cam video showing what happens when you impact 2 bearing balls against a copy paper sheet.
if this was true, they could have welded a 1 cm diameter ball bearing on the impact zone on each ball of its left, and improved the jig so that they are more likely to remain in the same vertical plane. I doubt it would have changed anything. The problem is with the balls themselves, they deform too much globally
@xl000 that's true. They could, but they didn't. The deformation issue is also true. The main point was that there were not enough perfect spherical giant balls around to make the experiment
1 - The energy efficiency is better measured by the height the out ball reaches. 2 - If any ball but the last one moves after impact, that's where your energy leaks to. alignment and spacing is crucial. 3 - nylon stretches too much. it will make the in ball hit slightly lower under influence of the extra force it needs for it to move in a circle. 4- if you're machining your suspension point, it pays off to have a single wire, with a micrometer tweakable suspension point.
Those balls are mild steel which is malleable compared to much harder chrome steel used for ball bearings. The steel at the point of contact compresses before transferring any movement to the next ball. Even chrome steel may not be hard enough to not compress at the point of contact with the weight of those balls, although it should compress less than mild steel and work a bit better.
outside of the metal is not hard enough to transfer all the energy, the way the chains are attached also allow for much more rotation than the small scale crane, and chain also is not as flexible and loses more energy
I think the problem with that car tipping, they weren't close enough to the fulcrum, being ass end heavy, with evidence being they were moving around inside the car with little visible forward tipping observed. Even a couple pounds that far from the fulcum should create enough of a moment arm to tip the car forward. I think they should have clearly marked, based on how Tori and Grant were seated and stationary, where the fulcrum was, precisely. For the wrecking ball cradle, normal newton's cradle balls are solid steel, they're probably losing energy, even with the central steel plates, to rig swinging and friction.
The loss in the reached horizontal displacement is a measure for the loss in energy, but it's not the actual loss percentage. The relation beteen these two quantities is non-linear because the balls are moving on a circle due to their suspension on a cable. Still, for small angles (measured between the cable an the vertical direction), the relation is approximately linear: it turns out that the energy loss is twice the loss in the reached horizontal displacement.
Watching them build the ramp for the car-tip-over-by-bird, just leaves me thinking: They had the bloody best job on the planet. That scene and hundreds of other Mythbuster-moments 🙂
The kinetic energy doesn't flow through on an flat plane which those steel plates are. . It starts at the point of impact on the sphere and then flares out to the total diameter which is half way through the sphere. Once it gets to the largest point then the energy compounds itself as it travels through the solid object and is now required to compress and builds up force and wants to exit at the direct opposite side of impact point which then transfers that built up energy to the next ball. They must be solid spheres for this to work no matter what the size.
It just needs to be a perfectly elastic ball so there is only elastic and no plastic deformations and elastic collisions. I dont think you need solid balls necessarily, just balls designed to compress elasticly spring back fully to their original shape without energy losses inside of them through friction and deformation.
You need solid objects that make good contact with each other, but the sphere does not need to be solid. Their methodology was nearly entirely correct by using discs. The only potential problem is that adding the concrete _might_ allow for the hemispheres themselves to bend when being struck. I do tend to doubt that this is occurring though, since the sphere shape is highly resistant to that sort of thing. The problem is due to steel's strength not increasing as much with thickness as compared to how much it's weight increases with size.
Its about ELASTIC vs PLASTIC collisions, when the balls are being deformed, energy is lost INSIDE of the balls which means after they are compressed they dont spring back like a rubber band but instead remain in their sqashed form - something like that...
Pretty much everything they had in that setup was eating up energy, the concrete, the steel insert was deforming, the cables, the balls themselves were spending energy on rotations. This needs to be done properly with proper full Steel/Chromium balls, a proper anchoring system so the balls don't rotate, not at ball anchor and not at the frame, but that would be very expensive. I do believe with the right ball material, the cradle would get some bounces, and it's probably easy to calculate by someone with expertise in that.
I just worked it out, about 2,537lbs of concrete no where near 10,000lbs, as at 26:05. But it is all good fun, so I will keep watching. (Jamie said later, "over a ton"). I think the 1st ball only should have been filled with concrete, the others, with the steel plate inluded, left empty.
To make and endless Newton Cradle, the balls have to be as exactly the same in form and material and the hanging is to be made in a way that minimizes the loss of energy. Additionally, the hanging has to be in exactly the distance of the ball, so that the balls are just touching each other. The first selfmade Newton Cradle (97%) had different amount of glue, additionally remarkably thicker "threads" to hold them - as the "threads" are moving within themselves, they are absorbing energy. Cradle 2 (94%) : Same as with cradle one. Meanwhile the hanging is a rope, which takes still more of the energy. Then the rope was going through holes, which might not have been in exactly the same distance, even though you still did a good job. The weight on the ropes meanwhile is quite significant. The rope is loosing significantly more energy to the stand of the cradle. Whereas the different weight of the glue might have less influence, as it is less in relation to the weight of the balls. With the balls of mixed materials: Different materials are reacting different on an impulse. Even different consistence makes a huge difference. Turn a cooked and a raw egg - you see?. So mixed material means per se a loss of energy. No matter whether there is a steel plate between the concrete or not. The demolition balls additionally had another problem: the energy was big enough to change the form of the balls during the impact. Loss of energy due to transformation. With the car: you did not get the exact point of equilibrium. The first time you were quite near to it, waving your arms and moving your bodies a little bit would let the car fall down. But with the birds - as long as you can move your arms and move your body, no bird will manage to move your car. You just were too fizzly to get the very point. If you had gotten the right point of equilibrium you'd have fallen down because you could just not sit still without moving. So, no, the myth isn't busted.
I love how in the middle of the work with the wrecking balls Jamie and Adam stop just to olay wiht the sound of hammers hitting on a piece of hardened steel
The cradle device with the largest-diameter collision balls on public display was visible for more than a year in Milwaukee, Winconsin, at the retail store American Science and Surplus. Each ball was an inflatable exercise ball 66 cm (26 in) in diameter (encased in steel rings, was supported from the ceiling using extremely strong magnets. It was dismantled in early August 2010 due to maintenance concerns.
Anyone who has had experience with pressure vessels would have told them to make their steel shells, then fill them with water pressurised up a couple of bar. Liquids are not compressible, so if you have a good spherical ball where the stresses are evenly spread to avoid deformation, you would get a much more elastic bounce.
I can't believe you guys didn't see what was the problem. The cables are not exactly vertical, when the ball hits, the ball at the other side went off, but the remaining balls are trying to be, aligned vertically. Besides, the cables are too long and the friction in "connections" is high.
Wow I don't think I got to watch this episode. I was already mid in uni back then. What a cool thing to see! I wonder what would it take to recreate (or at least approximate) the results of the Newton Cradle at the wrecking ball scale.
Didn't watch entirely, but the wreaking balls dampening is simply due to steal being compressed over its elasticity limit. so once you reach this limit, the more you add weight, the more dampening you get. also, perfect sphere have a contact point extremely small, so the elasticity limit is almost exceeded in any setup
You know as you increase the size, the material strength still remains same so the elasticity also. That's why the balls absorb energy by deforming before transferring to another ball.
I think the big newton cradle could have become slightly more efficient from continued use because all those contact points may work harden as they get squished (as long as no fractures form). Then if they only get pulled back slightly, there should be much less plastic deformation.
Similarly to heat transfer the change of material will impact energy transfer. In full steel balls you can expect the energy to radiate in all directions from the point of impact and for all the waves to converge back to the other side of the ball around the same time (with a bit of delay for some waves). Unfortunately, with the disk, the propagation of the waves will be faster through the disk than through the concrete. As the energy wave moves through the disk, it will dissipate more and more energy through the concrete (like a resistor in an electric circuit). In the end the energy moving through the concrete arrives on the other side of the ball at a different time, when the adjacent ball has already been set in motion by the wave moving through the disk. This will cause the ball to sway... and the returning impact (from ball 5 to 4) will not land on the disk since 4 sways away from its resting position where the disks where aligned. Hence, a hit on the concrete part results in a very poor transmission, more sway, and poorer transfer with each collisions. You gotta show us your big balls made of steel guys! It was great to watch though :)
They didn't specifically state it in this episode, but in other episodes, when they've used chickens like this, they were expired ones that were never going to be eaten. I suspect that was the case in this episode, or I at least hope it was...
I don't know about the feasibility on a large scale, but for the big cradle, intuitively, I'd expect rigid "cables" to work much better, because it would force the energy transfer to go only in the right direction. But I think the non-fixed upper structure is the most dooming factor in the experiment because as one ball drops the top structure being too light it starts moving a lot in the opposite direction to conserve total momentum. I'm not very surprised about the poor performance of the huge cradle, but I would have expected the lower-scale ones to work even better (to a point, as we saw) as the scale is increased, because I would have expected the relative effects of air resistance and lateral wobble to diminish. Probably also the frame is too light in the lower scale experiments, and the same total momentum conservation problem explains the lower performance. You should maybe try fixing the frames to the ground and adding diagonal bars to avoid elastic deformation of the cradle itself. Anyone have a better physical explanation of these observations?
You pretty much got it all right. It's mainly material rigidity, minimization of plastic deformation. And also ideally the ball at the contact area should also be as round as possible to concentrate all the kinetic energy to one specific and as small of a point in surface area as possible, to minimize additional losses and energy dissipation through surface area and friction on impact (imagine if it were cubes instead of spheres; well same concept but an magnified example) The structure itself should not only be more rigid and fixed; but should also ideally, be more massive, to a better more favourable ratio in total structural mass, in proportion to balls. So it does not only overwhelm the structural integrity and causes additional losses that way, but also prevent and minimize further propagation of kinetic energy through and "down the chain/line" to other anchor chains and structures that they used to secure their frame; adding even more additional losses. (Think of, imagine the smaller scale ones had their structural frame replaced and made of foam instead of metal, and then on top of that instead of placing that on top of a table or the ground, it where hang and suspended in the air through several strings. Again that was basically the same concept and example taken to a hyperbolic extreme, of their large full sized version) It would take someone far more specialised in physics calculations to figure out what percentage of the energy losses are due to the structural support and what proportion to the balls themselves. But all of that is clearly and obviously also another significant factor besides just the balls and their materials.
Steel, with that amount of force, can't perform an elastic bump. Deformation is what absorbs the energy. If you drop a ball bearing on an anvil it bounces back, but if you shoot it with a rifle it deforms and stops.
I think some simple maths would point to the failure of the giant balls being that forces at collision had gone beyond the elastic point of the steel, rather like if you made the five inch balls out of plasticene, the balls were being deformed by the impact turning all or a large percent of the kinetic energy into thermal energy IMHO
This is why scaling a newton's cradle up is not working: The idea depends un conservation of energy which requires the collisions to be elastic. As soon as the contact pressure between the colliding balls is larger then the yield rate of the used material the plastic deformation will consume energy. The contact pressure in this case is proportional to sqrt(m/r) (with r as sphere radius and m as its mass). Since m is proportional to r³ we get sqrt(r²) which is simplified to r. So the contact pressure grows linear with sphere radius. This effect is not visible in the small scale experiments, as it only has an effect when the resulting pressure is above the yield rate. This is effect exacerbated by the steel of the ball bearings having a much higher yield stress.
Contact between the balls is a line because the 3” steel plate has not been turned to have a 38” curve. A Newton cradle relays on a single point contact not a vertical line contact where there is room for potential movement. Also, the hanging point is 6-8 inches above the curvature of the ball causing a wobble in the ball which eventually off-sets the accuracy of the point contact. The normal Newton’s Cradle also uses balls with high modulus of hardness not a basic level of hardness. So, so many issues affecting the poor performance. What do you think?
could measure the temperature of the balls, maybe some of that impact is converted into heat since those balls smash so hard that those literally change their shape, that takes energy
i think it's about the compression upon impact. when they're that heavy they deform each other and boat-loads of energy gets turned into heat. i bet if you did this with heat-treated and solid spheres you'd get a much higher return on energy spent, due to way less of the surfaces coming into contact during impact.
The bird will cause the car to tip, but it's clearly not finely balanced enough. When you're only using grams to tip the weight, the balance has to be within grams
increasing mass but using the same material and thus not increasing stiffness with it, is what we see here. Energy goes into deformation. It's like using play-doh for the small cradle.
I've not they watched the whole video but I suspect that non elastic collisions with the really heavy wrecking balls might be an issue killing efficiency.
Full metal balls, perfectly spherical for transfer energy from a single tangent point, ropes with low mass and low inertia, there's plenty factors that could hardly be solved in that scale.
@@gabrielv.4358 No it doesn't they put the larger balls on hinges. The suspension lines shold have been run into the weights not some six inches above them. That was stupid and obvious.
These balls are not solid steel is one problem. The bigger problem is that the frame the balls were attached to was not rigid. It was suspended from a crane and some of the energy was moving the line holding the frame.
If you had large, solid steel, tempered steel balls, (like the desk top model) then it would work. The concrete and un-tempered (mild) steel are absorbing energy during the strike.
I know many have said it but i will too- im 100% sure it would work with real wreking balls- because they are solid. The problem here is they are hollow.. obviously i get why they couldnt do it with real ones tho.. it woulda been pimossible to source and bring them together or set them up- without huge costs and time.
You need harder balls. Glass maybe? At this energy level, steel balls deform a little in every impact. And they need a lot of energy for that. At desktop version there is not near enough energy for deformation, therefore almost all the energy goes just through the balls.
I'll be ever grateful that this is what I grew up watching.
same
oh yeah
i did, was fucking AMAZING
same
Feels like yesterday.
The problem with this that they do this not with complete steel balls. Complete steel ball would transfer energy properly, meanwhile steel shell with some soft cement inside act as baloon with water and all that energy is just wasted during transfer.
True, I think they should've tried welding a vertical steel disk too. I mean at 90 degrees. Half disk on the top half on the bottom. I guess that'd have increased eficiency a lot. not like full solid spheres but better than their single steel disk
it baffles me that they didn't mention this. their small scale concrete balls should have been a sign.
Doesn’t even have to be solid steel, had they just not filled them with concrete I’m sure it would have worked better.
Maybe but you also noticed how steel reformed it's shape.. Hyneman said it's not that there is no energy, well there was too much of energy that material couldn't handle..
The type of Metal is the problem, either they need to use steel with a lot of chrome, or make them entirely out of chrome(very hard) or titanium or an alloy wich is much less plastic deformable and more dynamic.
Did you ever drop a metal one of these toys? If they drop on Stone they bounce around a lot.
The principle at work is elastic collision, and Steel is really shitty at this game with energys this high.
Every bit of plastic deformation in the steel or cracks in the concrete weaken the principle at work.
Inhomogen composite balls are a dump idea in the first place, if theyd be homogen it would be less of a prob.
A car barreling down a hill dropping a trail of frozen chickens behind it with a robotic turkey dancing on its hood is a scene I would have never thought I'd see.
I though it was an exaggeration, but then i saw it, holy hell
@@MegooverYeah, that was Mythbusters, alright.
Not slightly vegan.
A rather disgraceful use of a food item: using bricks would have been far more ethical.
@@michaelbyrnee9584 They were probably expired and/or not fit for consumption anymore. A lot of food gets thrown out for that reason.
Finally looking mythbusters without ads
Revanced. 👍
Oh boy do I have bad news for you about where that wrecking ball video came from
@@Magmafrost13 mmm kit kat
That one didn't age quite so well.
@@hansolowe19 Adblock 😎😎😎
This show was not just the most important formative years of my early teens, through to adulthood. But, it was also THE single most important entertainment and relieve during the worst parts of my depression, a depression that started at age 12 and clinically"ended" at age 33. This show is one of the absolute major reasons that I'm still alive.
Seeing all these episodes finally being legally uploaded is so cool, emotional and amazing. This show not only educated me to love science, it not only saved my life, it inspired an entire generation to follow our dreams in life. However crazy they seemed, whomever told us to be careful.
Thank for, forever, to everyone on this show. In front, and behind, the camera. You did something absolutely amazing :)
Are you sure it wasn't the reason for your depression?
@@michaelmcneil4168shut up
I also was battling thingz at the time and this show was a massive hand during that period. America Chopper, ghost hunters, storm chasers ,deadliest catch and even Man vs WIld, good old bear grylls whatever you say about him helped me get through. Amazing life altering shows back them=n, so grateful.
For those wondering how this happens (they never explained it) the force that the steel can withstand scales at a slower rate with thickness than the force that the steel increases by in weight per increase in size.
The steel can't withstand all that force so it takes most of the energy into itself by deforming rather than moving (or transferring the "movement" to the next object)
That's how I see it too. The issue is material properties, not just scale. The correct terminology isn't "moving" though, its an impulse. The impulse is diminished by the energy being absorbed in the deformation of the material. Perhaps if they had solid chrome vanadium bearing ball steel, with amorphous metal layer on top they could achieve a working cradle. That would be a multi-million dollar investment though, if not a hundred million, so clearly not in the scope of a mythbusters project. Besides, the myth is busted anyway.
I see: so the steel is absorbing the impact much like a car does as it crumples in a car crash.
48:15 *notices all the wrecked watermelons*
... I get the impression that some footage didn't make it to the final cut. Hey, at least they had some fun at the end ;)
yeah, they mentioned a MythBusters finally, normally an explosion of some sort, so yeah, they prob did a finally and it wasnt worth it
Are you suggesting that they had some kind of party involving black people? How dare you sir! I will not stand for that.
@@BloodyBamPot actual brainrot
@@jonessii actual dumb joke. I know you need to be told these things.
@@jonessii actual moron
Seeing Grant on set... he had so much more to give the world.
One shouldn't be overwhelmed by sorrow over loss.
One should instead be happy over who he was, what he was, that he was, and to whom he was.
And for the time that we got to to experience his fantastic personality.
We will always miss him. 🥺
Yeah. Miss Grant too.
that newton cradle was actually a kitkat commercial
I remembered it was an ad but not which, nice memory
@@EmpPeng2k7 also makes me feel fucking old xd
I knew it was fake
@@gabrielv.4358Well they knew it wasn’t real they wanted to know if it was actually possible to do
I'm so gratefull to finally get to watch it again, love the show. Cheers from Brasil!
Gladly cothink same about it, cheers from Türkiye!
Tmj mano kkkk
Best tv show ever! Cheers from Poland!
Brazil mentioned 🎉🥂🎆🇧🇷
Honestly, when i saw that giant newtons cradle, my thought was "ohhhh that was a good Episode"
I grew up watching the german dub of the show, but now as a more fluent english speaker i really love the original
I actually learned English from top gear and myth busters
Used to watch this show as a child. Looking back now as a mechanical engineer in my mid 20s, it's even more fun now that I understand the physics behind everything and can make my own predictions. Very grateful for this.
my 2 cents, I think contributing factor to the fact that the large scale cradle didn't work, apart from what has already been mentioned is that the supporting structure has to be 100% rigid and fixed. The way they hanged it off a crane would not allow even perfect balls to do the trick, as wobbling hanging steel frame just absorbs too much energy. I cannot see how they didn't see it.
I think an ostrich could do the job.
Ostriches don't fly... so they'd have to climb on from behind and walk over the roof.
@@EarlJohn61 Fried chicken also don't fly.
I absolutely love how even under his giant helmet, you can see how happy Tori is while his robo-turkey is freaking out Kari hahaha
We used to stamp steel downhole oil tools' serial numbers with a hammer and metal stamp kit. I would never sit there like they were at 14:00 watching the balls collide. Hardened metal can shatter and eject fragments at bullet speeds.
They are perfect balls though, reaaally tough to crack these. If they did, enormous ball bearings wouldn't be safe to be around either correct?
@@Auxius.Bearings fail all the time. They are also built for Hardness and that hardness gives them high resistance to wear, but are very brittle to impacts. Cracking them together like that is an impact.
@@MysterySemicolon I'll ask my brother that works at SKF, however I've never heard a bearing fail because of an impact- denting perhaps rendering them unusable, but exploding or catastrophically fragmentating could be a whole new mythbusters episode.
Simply not going to happen. Sorry, you're spreading myths.
If you need more weight for the car to fall down, then it's not really at his tipping point in the first place.
Right? I lost a bit of respect for them for busting this clearly true physics exam question.
Yep. They should have put a tank of water in the trunk and slowly pumped it out until the car "teetered".
@@tooby98765 Yes, but i think the experiment was not really can it happen, it was more like is there a chance that it could ramdomly happen. So the result is probably not. :D
@@melonenlord2723 It should have been "plausible", not "busted".
If the car was at its tipping point when the 2 men got inside and sat down behind the balance point, thus transferring extra weight to the rear, it was obvious that far more weight would be required onto the bonnet to achieve success
"Because the viral video was nothing but CGI."
You don't say? I think one of the problems of later Mythbusters seasons was that they had essentially burned through all good myths and started going after viral videos/random stuff from TH-cam. While interesting to watch, it was clear from the very beginning that they would end up busting the vast majority of them, due to CG being used to fake everything. Mythbusters ended well, but it was clear that they were more or less creatively treading water at this point and that they wanted to move on.
RIP Grant
the more i watch Mythbusters, the more i wanna have a Crown Vic...
Thanks for Uploading all those Episodes of Mythbusters, i really like this Show!
On this episode of Mythbusters: The narrator's inexplicable fear of the right speaker.
One thing I learned a few years after this episode aired was that the shape of the contact points has a huge effect on how the energy is transferred. The reason is that a pure sphere has a very tiny point of contact through which all of its own energy is going out. When a secondary object also has such a minimal contact point, almost 100% of the energy is transferred. Of course, the rig itself and its setup are important as it also can absorb some of that energy. I might be wrong, but I think I learned this from Adam in a TH-cam video showing what happens when you impact 2 bearing balls against a copy paper sheet.
if this was true, they could have welded a 1 cm diameter ball bearing on the impact zone on each ball of its left, and improved the jig so that they are more likely to remain in the same vertical plane. I doubt it would have changed anything.
The problem is with the balls themselves, they deform too much globally
@xl000 that's true. They could, but they didn't. The deformation issue is also true. The main point was that there were not enough perfect spherical giant balls around to make the experiment
1 - The energy efficiency is better measured by the height the out ball reaches.
2 - If any ball but the last one moves after impact, that's where your energy leaks to. alignment and spacing is crucial.
3 - nylon stretches too much. it will make the in ball hit slightly lower under influence of the extra force it needs for it to move in a circle.
4- if you're machining your suspension point, it pays off to have a single wire, with a micrometer tweakable suspension point.
The amount of “balls” bits was making it more hilarious every time
Those balls are mild steel which is malleable compared to much harder chrome steel used for ball bearings. The steel at the point of contact compresses before transferring any movement to the next ball. Even chrome steel may not be hard enough to not compress at the point of contact with the weight of those balls, although it should compress less than mild steel and work a bit better.
Maybe metal glass balls, but have no idea whether it is possible or practical to create metal glass balls of that size
The world need more mythBusters
This has got to be one of my favorites
lol that helocopter, man we have come a long way with drones in a short time !
outside of the metal is not hard enough to transfer all the energy, the way the chains are attached also allow for much more rotation than the small scale crane, and chain also is not as flexible and loses more energy
I was about to write something similar :)
Yes
Chains?
They used chains?
WTH did they use chains?
I think the problem with that car tipping, they weren't close enough to the fulcrum, being ass end heavy, with evidence being they were moving around inside the car with little visible forward tipping observed. Even a couple pounds that far from the fulcum should create enough of a moment arm to tip the car forward. I think they should have clearly marked, based on how Tori and Grant were seated and stationary, where the fulcrum was, precisely.
For the wrecking ball cradle, normal newton's cradle balls are solid steel, they're probably losing energy, even with the central steel plates, to rig swinging and friction.
43:00 we all know in the end they had the forklift just push the damn car down
The loss in the reached horizontal displacement is a measure for the loss in energy, but it's not the actual loss percentage. The relation beteen these two quantities is non-linear because the balls are moving on a circle due to their suspension on a cable.
Still, for small angles (measured between the cable an the vertical direction), the relation is approximately linear: it turns out that the energy loss is twice the loss in the reached horizontal displacement.
Watching them build the ramp for the car-tip-over-by-bird, just leaves me thinking: They had the bloody best job on the planet. That scene and hundreds of other Mythbuster-moments 🙂
The kinetic energy doesn't flow through on an flat plane which those steel plates are. . It starts at the point of impact on the sphere and then flares out to the total diameter which is half way through the sphere. Once it gets to the largest point then the energy compounds itself as it travels through the solid object and is now required to compress and builds up force and wants to exit at the direct opposite side of impact point which then transfers that built up energy to the next ball. They must be solid spheres for this to work no matter what the size.
It just needs to be a perfectly elastic ball so there is only elastic and no plastic deformations and elastic collisions. I dont think you need solid balls necessarily, just balls designed to compress elasticly spring back fully to their original shape without energy losses inside of them through friction and deformation.
It would work with flat plane if there wasn't cement or other plastic material on them.
@@dalex641 I would have done it with big hammers instead of big wrecking balls. get rid of the string
You need solid objects that make good contact with each other, but the sphere does not need to be solid. Their methodology was nearly entirely correct by using discs.
The only potential problem is that adding the concrete _might_ allow for the hemispheres themselves to bend when being struck. I do tend to doubt that this is occurring though, since the sphere shape is highly resistant to that sort of thing.
The problem is due to steel's strength not increasing as much with thickness as compared to how much it's weight increases with size.
@@MsHojat that is a testable hypothesis. remove the concrete and do just the discs, how does it operate?
Destroying a Ford Crown Victoria is like killing an American eagle.
I am just thinking about my 45mm bearing balls waiting in the drawer to be built into something big 😂
Its about ELASTIC vs PLASTIC collisions, when the balls are being deformed, energy is lost INSIDE of the balls which means after they are compressed they dont spring back like a rubber band but instead remain in their sqashed form - something like that...
And/or the energy gets converted to heat.
you can clearly see that concrete is absorbing the energy, that's why it's not working. if you cut and open the ball, you will see cracked concrete.
Pretty much everything they had in that setup was eating up energy, the concrete, the steel insert was deforming, the cables, the balls themselves were spending energy on rotations. This needs to be done properly with proper full Steel/Chromium balls, a proper anchoring system so the balls don't rotate, not at ball anchor and not at the frame, but that would be very expensive. I do believe with the right ball material, the cradle would get some bounces, and it's probably easy to calculate by someone with expertise in that.
I just worked it out, about 2,537lbs of concrete no where near 10,000lbs, as at 26:05. But it is all good fun, so I will keep watching. (Jamie said later, "over a ton"). I think the 1st ball only should have been filled with concrete, the others, with the steel plate inluded, left empty.
To make and endless Newton Cradle, the balls have to be as exactly the same in form and material and the hanging is to be made in a way that minimizes the loss of energy.
Additionally, the hanging has to be in exactly the distance of the ball, so that the balls are just touching each other. The first selfmade Newton Cradle (97%) had different amount of glue, additionally remarkably thicker "threads" to hold them - as the "threads" are moving within themselves, they are absorbing energy.
Cradle 2 (94%) : Same as with cradle one. Meanwhile the hanging is a rope, which takes still more of the energy. Then the rope was going through holes, which might not have been in exactly the same distance, even though you still did a good job. The weight on the ropes meanwhile is quite significant. The rope is loosing significantly more energy to the stand of the cradle. Whereas the different weight of the glue might have less influence, as it is less in relation to the weight of the balls.
With the balls of mixed materials: Different materials are reacting different on an impulse. Even different consistence makes a huge difference. Turn a cooked and a raw egg - you see?. So mixed material means per se a loss of energy. No matter whether there is a steel plate between the concrete or not. The demolition balls additionally had another problem: the energy was big enough to change the form of the balls during the impact. Loss of energy due to transformation.
With the car: you did not get the exact point of equilibrium. The first time you were quite near to it, waving your arms and moving your bodies a little bit would let the car fall down. But with the birds - as long as you can move your arms and move your body, no bird will manage to move your car. You just were too fizzly to get the very point. If you had gotten the right point of equilibrium you'd have fallen down because you could just not sit still without moving.
So, no, the myth isn't busted.
Best episode ever. Made me smile all though it. 😁
Hm, at 34:47, those stickers should increase the loss, it was not a good idea. Anyways, steel is too soft on this scale. Cool!
they did remove the stickers between the balls
I love how in the middle of the work with the wrecking balls Jamie and Adam stop just to olay wiht the sound of hammers hitting on a piece of hardened steel
Those are the two most educated pigeons I've ever seen.
yep. I've been watching a episode a day for a couple days now and I'm confident that it'll last until xmas
the wreckingball dropoff 15:40 is due to the wiggle room that the rope and pipe construktion provide
Got a Kit Kat ad from TH-cam while watching this lol
The cradle device with the largest-diameter collision balls on public display was visible for more than a year in Milwaukee, Winconsin, at the retail store American Science and Surplus. Each ball was an inflatable exercise ball 66 cm (26 in) in diameter (encased in steel rings, was supported from the ceiling using extremely strong magnets. It was dismantled in early August 2010 due to maintenance concerns.
Looks and sounds kind of like a fake Newton's cradle though, considering how it's not using hard material nor solid material.
Anyone who has had experience with pressure vessels would have told them to make their steel shells, then fill them with water pressurised up a couple of bar. Liquids are not compressible, so if you have a good spherical ball where the stresses are evenly spread to avoid deformation, you would get a much more elastic bounce.
thank god we god this on youtube. little me always hated the cutting between different experiments
RIP Grant. That guy is a legend.
Instead of measuring sideways distances, they should measure height, which is potential energy efficiency.
Wich is directly proportional to the vertical distance away
New question: What is the optimal size for a Newton's Cradle such that it taps the longest. Is it simply "the smaller the better"?🤔
I can't believe you guys didn't see what was the problem. The cables are not exactly vertical, when the ball hits, the ball at the other side went off, but the remaining balls are trying to be, aligned vertically. Besides, the cables are too long and the friction in "connections" is high.
newton's cradle: disproving planetary aggregation theory since forever
Wow I don't think I got to watch this episode. I was already mid in uni back then. What a cool thing to see! I wonder what would it take to recreate (or at least approximate) the results of the Newton Cradle at the wrecking ball scale.
Didn't watch entirely, but the wreaking balls dampening is simply due to steal being compressed over its elasticity limit. so once you reach this limit, the more you add weight, the more dampening you get. also, perfect sphere have a contact point extremely small, so the elasticity limit is almost exceeded in any setup
You know as you increase the size, the material strength still remains same so the elasticity also. That's why the balls absorb energy by deforming before transferring to another ball.
I wonder if hollow balls would actually work (with the same plate in the middle). Lower mass would mean less force and less plastic deformation
I think the big newton cradle could have become slightly more efficient from continued use because all those contact points may work harden as they get squished (as long as no fractures form). Then if they only get pulled back slightly, there should be much less plastic deformation.
awesome experiment. For the wrecking ball, the 3 inches plate better hanging vertically to each other rather than horizontally..
Similarly to heat transfer the change of material will impact energy transfer.
In full steel balls you can expect the energy to radiate in all directions from the point of impact and for all the waves to converge back to the other side of the ball around the same time (with a bit of delay for some waves). Unfortunately, with the disk, the propagation of the waves will be faster through the disk than through the concrete. As the energy wave moves through the disk, it will dissipate more and more energy through the concrete (like a resistor in an electric circuit). In the end the energy moving through the concrete arrives on the other side of the ball at a different time, when the adjacent ball has already been set in motion by the wave moving through the disk. This will cause the ball to sway... and the returning impact (from ball 5 to 4) will not land on the disk since 4 sways away from its resting position where the disks where aligned. Hence, a hit on the concrete part results in a very poor transmission, more sway, and poorer transfer with each collisions.
You gotta show us your big balls made of steel guys!
It was great to watch though :)
"if the owls not gonna do it, I don't know what is" I am pretty sure an ostrich would do
Ostriches also don't fly. Is it going to run onto the hood of the car?
@somedude3443 oh yeah I forgot about that part, let's just assume someone drops it from a helicopter
i can't imagine how furious a chicken would be to see like 40 sisters raised and slaughtered just to be dumped on a balanced car thingie 😢
They didn't specifically state it in this episode, but in other episodes, when they've used chickens like this, they were expired ones that were never going to be eaten. I suspect that was the case in this episode, or I at least hope it was...
I don't know about the feasibility on a large scale, but for the big cradle, intuitively, I'd expect rigid "cables" to work much better, because it would force the energy transfer to go only in the right direction.
But I think the non-fixed upper structure is the most dooming factor in the experiment because as one ball drops the top structure being too light it starts moving a lot in the opposite direction to conserve total momentum.
I'm not very surprised about the poor performance of the huge cradle, but I would have expected the lower-scale ones to work even better (to a point, as we saw) as the scale is increased, because I would have expected the relative effects of air resistance and lateral wobble to diminish.
Probably also the frame is too light in the lower scale experiments, and the same total momentum conservation problem explains the lower performance. You should maybe try fixing the frames to the ground and adding diagonal bars to avoid elastic deformation of the cradle itself.
Anyone have a better physical explanation of these observations?
You pretty much got it all right. It's mainly material rigidity, minimization of plastic deformation. And also ideally the ball at the contact area should also be as round as possible to concentrate all the kinetic energy to one specific and as small of a point in surface area as possible, to minimize additional losses and energy dissipation through surface area and friction on impact (imagine if it were cubes instead of spheres; well same concept but an magnified example)
The structure itself should not only be more rigid and fixed; but should also ideally, be more massive, to a better more favourable ratio in total structural mass, in proportion to balls. So it does not only overwhelm the structural integrity and causes additional losses that way, but also prevent and minimize further propagation of kinetic energy through and "down the chain/line" to other anchor chains and structures that they used to secure their frame; adding even more additional losses. (Think of, imagine the smaller scale ones had their structural frame replaced and made of foam instead of metal, and then on top of that instead of placing that on top of a table or the ground, it where hang and suspended in the air through several strings. Again that was basically the same concept and example taken to a hyperbolic extreme, of their large full sized version)
It would take someone far more specialised in physics calculations to figure out what percentage of the energy losses are due to the structural support and what proportion to the balls themselves. But all of that is clearly and obviously also another significant factor besides just the balls and their materials.
@@ion_X thx 👍
this was great episode
Steel, with that amount of force, can't perform an elastic bump. Deformation is what absorbs the energy. If you drop a ball bearing on an anvil it bounces back, but if you shoot it with a rifle it deforms and stops.
what is the hardness of those steel plates in the middle?
I think some simple maths would point to the failure of the giant balls being that forces at collision had gone beyond the elastic point of the steel, rather like if you made the five inch balls out of plasticene, the balls were being deformed by the impact turning all or a large percent of the kinetic energy into thermal energy IMHO
Is it possible that ball bearings have internal tension as well high density material making more of like spherical spring 🤔
The car does not move because you are still not on the perfect balance point.
This is why scaling a newton's cradle up is not working:
The idea depends un conservation of energy which requires the collisions to be elastic. As soon as the contact pressure between the colliding balls is larger then the yield rate of the used material the plastic deformation will consume energy. The contact pressure in this case is proportional to sqrt(m/r) (with r as sphere radius and m as its mass). Since m is proportional to r³ we get sqrt(r²) which is simplified to r. So the contact pressure grows linear with sphere radius. This effect is not visible in the small scale experiments, as it only has an effect when the resulting pressure is above the yield rate. This is effect exacerbated by the steel of the ball bearings having a much higher yield stress.
Contact between the balls is a line because the 3” steel plate has not been turned to have a 38” curve. A Newton cradle relays on a single point contact not a vertical line contact where there is room for potential movement. Also, the hanging point is 6-8 inches above the curvature of the ball causing a wobble in the ball which eventually off-sets the accuracy of the point contact. The normal Newton’s Cradle also uses balls with high modulus of hardness not a basic level of hardness. So, so many issues affecting the poor performance. What do you think?
Now try this with the Haast eagle 😂
I got 10 minutes in before I remembered Grant is dead, feels strange watching the show again knowing that
could measure the temperature of the balls, maybe some of that impact is converted into heat since those balls smash so hard that those literally change their shape, that takes energy
use rusty balls and aluminium foil to make a thermite version
i think it's about the compression upon impact. when they're that heavy they deform each other and boat-loads of energy gets turned into heat. i bet if you did this with heat-treated and solid spheres you'd get a much higher return on energy spent, due to way less of the surfaces coming into contact during impact.
Just for fun the should make a small scale replica of the big one they built 👍
The bird will cause the car to tip, but it's clearly not finely balanced enough. When you're only using grams to tip the weight, the balance has to be within grams
Yes, I'm not surprised. For the largest Newon's Cradle the active mass is very small. Curvature is important for perfect energy transfer.
I always tought that the cables they used for the large scale cradle were far too long
increasing mass but using the same material and thus not increasing stiffness with it, is what we see here. Energy goes into deformation. It's like using play-doh for the small cradle.
The big Newtons Cradle looks awesome, sad it is Not working
It seems the huge ball is not solid enough to make perfectly elastic collision.
weight in scale is the problem along with materials involved.
I've not they watched the whole video but I suspect that non elastic collisions with the really heavy wrecking balls might be an issue killing efficiency.
Full metal balls, perfectly spherical for transfer energy from a single tangent point, ropes with low mass and low inertia, there's plenty factors that could hardly be solved in that scale.
also on miniature version of cradle air ressistance is far less ... would be awsome if it worked but :((
2% to 3% is not 1% difference! It's 50% difference!
True, but they were still right that it was scaling well. 2000% size increase and ONLY 50% loss increase is still very good
I never understood percentage. this makes less sense
@@gabrielv.4358 No it doesn't they put the larger balls on hinges. The suspension lines shold have been run into the weights not some six inches above them. That was stupid and obvious.
Isn't it a 1% drop in efficiency as they went from 98% to 97% efficient
(97% - 98%) / 98% ~ 0.0102 = 1.02 %
@@tjampman That's not waht he said.
Desktop version has solid balls. These balls are hollow. That's why they don't bounce properly.
Most of the energy loss is because the steel balls are hitting hard enough that they are exceeding the elastic limit for the steel used.
These balls are not solid steel is one problem. The bigger problem is that the frame the balls were attached to was not rigid. It was suspended from a crane and some of the energy was moving the line holding the frame.
The steel needs to be hardened just like a ball from a ball bearing. The steel is to soft. Or dip them in liquid nitrogen to make them hard
44:12 nice song!
I think if fhey had a steel(or harder) lining underneath the car to prevent deformation of the bottom, a smaller weight would tip it.
If you had large, solid steel, tempered steel balls, (like the desk top model) then it would work. The concrete and un-tempered (mild) steel are absorbing energy during the strike.
Should have used a titanium carbide balls. The steel is too soft for that scale.
I know many have said it but i will too- im 100% sure it would work with real wreking balls- because they are solid. The problem here is they are hollow.. obviously i get why they couldnt do it with real ones tho.. it woulda been pimossible to source and bring them together or set them up- without huge costs and time.
You need harder balls. Glass maybe? At this energy level, steel balls deform a little in every impact. And they need a lot of energy for that. At desktop version there is not near enough energy for deformation, therefore almost all the energy goes just through the balls.