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The Unsolved Mystery of Impact Flashes - Smarter Every Day 307

3.8M views · Mar 31, 2025 · Science & Technology

SmarterEveryDay

12M subscribers

Comments · 22K

@smartereveryday · 1 year ago (edited) · pinned
Check out Henson Razors at: <a href="http://hensonshaving.com/smarter">http://hensonshaving.com/smarter</a> (Make sure the 100 pack is in your cart to get them for free.) Exploring these phenomena are a MASSIVE rabbit hole I've learned. I'm going to be reading the comments on Patreon for this one to discuss what experiments we should do in a follow up video. That post is here: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/mystery-of-every-125593877">https://www.patreon.com/posts/mystery-of-every-125593877</a>   Thank you to everyone who supports on Patreon!
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@jaimeduncan6167 · 1 year ago (edited)
I am not convinced, we need to run it in a vacuum and show that there is no light. We need the next video. I agree 100%
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@matthewmalaker477 · 1 year ago
"We dieseled mayonnaise" is not a sentence I expected to hear when watching this, but I welcome it wholeheartedly.
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@leeaf7 · 1 year ago
Destin, I appreciate your long but in-depth video. In a world of shorts and tiktok, this is beyond refreshing. Don’t ever stop.. Regards,
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@ddritter · 8 months ago
I love hearing "I don't know". It should be heard a lot more in our society.
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@ZheruiMartinez-Guo · 1 year ago (edited)
@smartereveryday  Hi Destin! Really honored that my paper was featured by you in this video! I dropped you an email as well, but long story short: Dickinson (et al.) published a series of works in the late 1980's to early 90s examining the fracture emission in polymers, while some more recent work (Bonora et al., 2014) has actually looked at this in vacuo, and others showed different kinds of light colors emitted with different ambient gases. My goal was to test a hypothesis by impacting very long polymer rods in vacuo to see if it travels at the speed of the plastic wave down the rod, but I never got to finish the experiments. We did have a spectrometer in later experiments, but the model we had wasn't fast enough for the duration of the flash to record sufficient data. Happy to chat more or help you test out the hypotheses!
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@vague2718 · 1 year ago
I actually appreciated the lack of editing with this video! A very genuine feeling of having fun with a neat science experiment! Thanks for the content as always!
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@jonathan1253 · 1 year ago
Destin, in case someone has not already suggested this - get a spectrograph to analyze the flashes. If the flash relates to the compression/heating of the gas causing it to emit light, the spectrographic signature of that light should change depending on the gas in the chamber.  Change the gas, measure the flash with the spectrograph, then compare....  And good luck !  That was fun to watch.
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@SiNFPVGUAM · 10 months ago (edited)
Reminds me of how a fire piston works, air molecules getting smashed between two objects.
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@howridiculous · 1 year ago
It was great chatting with you Destin, there's no doubt we need to get smarter every day haha
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@thethoughtemporium · 1 year ago (edited)
Having spent a lot of time playing with sonoluminescence, this effect has always struck me as being the same. The gases light up when squeezed super hard. They're not burning per say (in the case of argon and such), they are just being heated so much and so fast that they ionize. If the things colliding are capable of burning, you also get a burst of the diesel effect where it's flash vaporized, and burnt giving the the characteristic fireball. You see the same flashes underwater, only because it's underwater you also see a bubble-like void form before the flash. In air, that void must be tiny because the fluid is so much thinner. But the flash resulting is the same. Though some mechanoluminescence is probably at plat as well.
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@an0mndr · 1 year ago
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nilP--GFLY&t=2758">45:58</a> fractoluminescence may still be possible, but at this point, im pretty much convinced you can generally call this shock ignition or adiabatic ignition.
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