Beautiful collision of two colored smoke rings

A red smoke ring and a blue smoke ring collide, with spectacular results. (Via Forgetomori)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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cymk

SCIENCE! Making the most boring topics look fun and extremely cool (since the invention of the scientific method?)
xzzy

If anything ever needed a remake, this is it.

I need it in 1080p, taken with a 1000 fps camera!
Cigarsam

@#15

Relatively true although wouldn’t the viscosity differences between the clear/dyed water, and the smoke/air have to be identical to produce the same effect?
Dchan

How pretty! The resulting wave pattern from the collision are so interesting. It makes me want to replicate the experiment to see different collision patterns. Too bad my mad science lair is still in it’s dreaming of phase.
EH

it was so awesome that the collision shook the camera.
freetard

Huh. I read the description as …”with specular results…”, which actually made it much more interesting!

Awesome video, now I need more, too!
Anonymous

Someone must know how this could be replicated with a computer model. That person should see this and replicate it. Then, said person should share the results here.
Cigarsam

I agree with #3. Most definitely colored liquid, not smoke.
- Anonymous
  
  @ #12
  
  Actually, for all intents and purposes air is, in fact, a liquid. Although I agree it looks like liquids, doing this experiment with smoke and then perhaps slowing it down should look the same.
Anonymous

KA-BLOOOOEY!
- Alkwerte
  
  I heard that too
WaylonWillie

sweet! buddhists are saying “look its a mandala!”

smokers challenge: replicate this by blowing colored smoke rings at each other.
Bodhipaksa

Yesterday I watched a jet’s contrails turn into pairs of rings. I’d never seen that before, and it was very , very cool. I tried to film it on my Flip, but I think it was too far away. Time to go check!
Anonymous

This is in water. Dye injection study.

Regular food coloring, two very simple jets, and a fish tank.

I did my thesis on Vortex Ring Entrainment. This video brought back horrible memories of many Saturday nights spent in the bowels of a fluids lab, collecting PIV data. . .
Anonymous

Okay, next Maker Faire, someone.
kip w

I tried that through my red/blue 3D glasses. Alas, there’s too much red in the blue and blue in the red, or something.
Anonymous

Hey guys! Wow what an amazing video! Now please anybody who understands the physics of this please explain this!… In my head when i saw this i imagined the awesome good old cliche of two dragonball z foes fighting in an epic battle and throwing opposing enegry balls at each other.. In the resulting collision either one beam would be destroyed or there would be a huge exposlion in the middle… Now in this smoke ring ring video when the rings collide it appears after the “explosion?” that most of the smoke on the edge is blue and the inner red.. What would this indicate? Using the dragonball z metaphor was the blue smoke more powerful? What was this because of? Larger quantities of smoke? Answers please!!
MrsBug

That is extremely cool.
droostring

The source link is broken.

This is pretty frickin cool, as other commentators have said, I wish it was a higher resolution. I’d love for a screencap of it to be my background.
apoxia

That is beautiful. Too bad the resolution is so poor!
MadMolecule

Very cool. It looks to me like it’s colored liquids, not smoke.
Thlayli

@apoxia. Damn you, 1970s video technology.
- apoxia
  
  Yeah, well I bet this wasn’t the only time in history someone carried out this particular experiment. There have to be higher resolution videos of this phenomenon somewhere.