I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

  • http://www.karljones.com karl_jones

    Tell us more about these “right circumstances”.

    We have to be in the vacuum chamber for the ping-pong ball to kill us, right?

    Recommendation:  do not weaponize.

    • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

      The vacuum chamber is only inside the barrel, and the target is outside, so a little atmosphere won’t protect you(though drag probably brings a ping pong ball down from that kind of muzzle velocity pretty quickly).

      What may be more likely to save you is size: .32 ACP, as its name suggests, is .32 inches in diameter, 7.65mm. A ping pong ball is either 38mm(2000 and previous) or 40mm(newer). (Though, size has its tradeoffs: above a certain size, impact is spread out enough to prevent penetration and deeper injuries. This is good. Below that size, though, the bigger the projectile the bigger and messier the hole, extra credit if it fragments or tumbles. If the projectile is going deep, or all the way through, you want a very small, very neat, little hole, not a huge gaping one. Not sure how far away you’d have to be before size goes from curse to blessing). Projectile crumpling may also help some, a celluloid ball full of air is going to crumple somewhat more easily than an FMJ full of lead.

      I certainly wouldn’t be first in line to test it though.

      • awjt

        start from way across the room (or parking lot) and then move closer until you can’t take it anymore

        • http://www.karljones.com karl_jones

          That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh — !

      • http://www.karljones.com karl_jones

        Realist.  I want to be killed by the ping-pong ball inside the vacuum chamber.  

        Like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where David Bowman is making a suitless jump through hard vacuum, and HAL-9000 (deranged from singing “Bicycle Built for Two” too many times) fires a ping-pong ball into the open airlock.

        But seriously:  thank you for explaining the physics.

    • http://twitter.com/NelC NelC

      Recommendation:  do weaponize.

      FTFY ;)

  • Paul Renault

    So, it’s like the Canadian Air Farce’s Chicken Cannon, but scaled down, eh?

  • E MM

    I did the math when I first heard this story.  If I didn’t drop a digit somewhere, the ping pong ball carries roughly the same kinetic energy as a frozen turkey travelling at 60mph.  Probably not suitable for classroom demos…but maybe out on the soccer field?

    • Tribune

      You do your calculations in frozen turkey equivalents?

      • awjt

        So THAT’S what FTE stands for.  I have been wondering that for years when our budgeters keep talking about FTEs this and FTEs that.

      • Ian Anthony

        Ah, but didn’t it instantly generate a mental image that made you understand exactly what he was talking about?

    • bzishi

      I think there is an error in your calculation.

      KE = 0.5 m*v^2
      KE_1 = KE_2
      m_1/m_2 = (v_2/v_1)^2

      This gives a ratio of 225 for the mass. Apparently a ping pong ball has a mass of 2.7 grams, so the other mass would be 607.5 grams. This is way too small for a turkey, but it is close to that of a basketball at 60 mph.

      • SamSam

        Your math checks out.

        The energy of a 2.7g ping pong ball travelling at 900 mph is instead equivalent to that of a 3 kg (6.6 lb) turkey travelling at 27 mph.

        Regardless, I don’t want to be on the receiving end of this turkey gun.

  • Jake0748

    Funnest thing I’ve seen all day.  (No, I’m not gonna try it at home).  I wish they had showed some of the high-speed camera footage that he talked about.

  • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

    Any word on the state of the ball after its no-doubt-traumatic deceleration?

    • Jake0748

      What ball?

  • awjt

    I bet Zhang Jike could return that, no sweat.

  • http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

    As described, we’re dealing with one version which uses one atmosphere and no nozzle, and another which uses two or three atmosphere and a nozzle. It feels incomplete without at least discussing a version with two or three atmospheres and no nozzle, and why this can’t break the sound barrier.

    • nixiebunny

      The nozzle is described as the thing that produces the supersonic air velocity. It is a rather nonlinear effect. Some would call it magic.

      • http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

        So you still need something to show the pressure itself doesn’t.

  • http://the-nerds.org/ Jeff Del Papa

    It should be interesting on the air cannon line come the November punkin chunk.  The only problem might be getting the barrel’s pumped down within the time limit.  (for those that haven’t seen one in the flesh, a “competitive” barrel is 10″ in diameter, and over 50′ long.  (with some of the winners sporting 120′ long tubes). 

    [added: "pump down in the time limit" - you have to put the gourd in the machine with the marshal watching. You then have 15 minutes to bring your pressure vessel up to launch pressure, and fire. For mechanical catapults, the time limit is only 5 minutes.]

    • ldobe

      Interesting proposition.

      I wonder if the vacuum might have a positive effect on keeping the pumpkin from going pie?  There might be less opposing force, since there’s no air drag on the leading aspect of the gourd…..Although, the gourd would be slamming into a wall of air at the end of the tube.  If it’s going mach 1.23, the heating might make it start to get all sloppy, or cause air pockets inside to expand some.  But then again, the pumpkin was already in a vacuum, which would make the air pockets expand as well.

      Fascinating.  I’m gonna have to go do some math now.

      • http://the-nerds.org/ Jeff Del Papa

         It occurred to me to wonder what was going to happen to the pumpkin when it got exposed to vacuum.  There is a whole lot of water in the thing, that will be wanting to change state.  I suppose “best” case, you get some sublimation, and cooling.  You would get a lighter, and tougher gourd.  Worst case, you get a cracked mess, and/or DQ’d for modifying the gourd.

        (for those that haven’t tried it, if you pull a vacuum on a container of water, the stuff first boils, then ice crystals form.)

        • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

          I know that a lot of produce carries the ‘Coated with food-grade vegetable-, petroleum-, beeswax-, and/or shellac based wax or resin to maintain freshness.’ tag and that that coating process is largely about reducing moisture permeability. Would such a mod disqualify a pumpkin?(It wouldn’t save you from what happens to a gourd with 1 atmosphere of pressure inside and ~0 outside; but it could keep the amount of fluid bleed to a minimum over the relatively short pressurization interval allowed by the contest…

          • http://the-nerds.org/ Jeff Del Papa

             The pumpkin gets sprayed with paint at weigh in.  (different color each day).  That would provided the equivalent of the wax.  I would do the experiment, but my vacuum pump is deeply buried.

  • http://profiles.google.com/marcoval Jeremy Tate

    There will be a CSI where this is the murder weapon out by the end of the year, bet on it. 

    • morcheeba

      Yeah, but they’ll fundamentally mess up the science and/or politics somehow. Remember the 3d printed gun episode? The protagonist wanted police to print guns as needed because… well, I guess he thought police had trouble acquiring guns. They totally missed the social implications.

      • JonS

         They’ll probably have the ping pong ball gun having an effective range of, like, 800m. Instead of 8m.

        Because a massive contraption that can barely hurt you from across the room just isn’t that scary, whereas a silent killer that leaves no traces and can getcha from three city blocks away … oooooh, scary.

  • Winslow Morgan

    Work on the vacuum spelling and give Venturi some credit..Mkay?    (Giovanni Battista Venturi,  {1797 Venturi effect}). 

    • http://the-nerds.org/ Jeff Del Papa

      Another deserving a little credit would be de Laval, who discovered the convergent/divergent nozzle shape.

  • http://www.facebook.com/justin.sabe Justin Sabe

    I demand that Myth Busters shoot supersonic pingpong balls at pig cascaras or other human analogs now! So I don’t have to. Because I don’t need to spend tomorrow trying to find the best price for a pig locally and seeing if I end up on a FBI watch list for trying to source the parts from Home Depot…

    • http://www.tumbleweed.net/ tyger11

       I’d prefer they use ballistics gel with a high speed camera; that would be a lot more interesting to watch.

  • Preston Sturges

    If they use nitrocellulose ping pong balls, I would think the impact would make it detonate.  If not, they should work on it. 

    • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

      Having set a number on fire for, um, purely educational purposes, my experience has been that not-a-whole-lot of nitrocellulose, not enclosed in any sort of pressure vessel, flares up quite pleasingly but doesn’t really ‘detonate’ in the sense that leaves you using base 8 when you count on your fingers…

  • Pat R x 2

    Hehehe! I saw this on the arXiv blog. They have a paper on it here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.5188

  • http://jayarava.blogspot.com Jayarava

    Yeah this was great. I like the warning about “don’t try this at home we have college degrees and special equipment”. If you look at their Youtube channel you can see them blasting soda cans http://youtu.be/VyCCo9i8Hwc and their special equipment for hearing protection consists of putting their fingers in their ears. No other safety equipment is visible, and one guys is standing about 1m away filming it on his phone. 

    • http://www.pseudographia.com/ James Craig

      I thought that warning was pretty ridiculous the first time I saw it and even more when repeated. They could have just said, “please don’t try this at home; it is very dangerous” and left it at that. 

      I’m guessing that years of experience is more relevant than 8 college degrees in this instance. And, while it’s great to have high-speed cameras and such, those do more to explain after the fact than to keep safe in the first place. Also, how’d they get those years of experience if they were following similar warnings?

      • s2redux

        I expect that experience is commensurate with 8 college degrees via the “yet another friggin’ lab course” factor.

  • emo hex

    “Your love,
    like a supersonic pingpong ball,
    leaves a hole
    in my heart!”

    “thank you very much”

  • Jack Daniel

    So when he says do not, DO NOT, try this at home, he actually means do…right?

  • Jon Smith

    Great video, great presentation, but why would any professor from a science department at an accredited program even mention imperial measurements?

  • Gregg Grose

    And the science gets done and you make a neat gun…

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000211802832 Steve Langstroth

    I’ll never make one. — Pinky Swear!

    LOL!!!

  • Steve Tedder

    The danger involved in building one of these things isn’t what you might do with the ping-pong ball. The danger is the possibility that the pressure vessel might explode and injure someone. If you aren’t completely confident of your ability to build such a vessel, you should leave this project alone. And remember, pressure vessels should be designed with a safety factor of at least five times the operating pressure! If you don’t know how to do that, just say no!

    • Scratcheee

      I noticed a complete lack of personal safety equipment in the soda can video.  No glasses, nothing.

  • jimkirk

    I’m not suggesting anyone try this ay home, but FYI, schedule 40 PVC 1 1/2  or 2 inch pipe operating pressure is greater than 11 atmospheres (198 psi for 1 1/2 inch, 166 psi for 2 inch).  Bursting pressure is about 5 times that.  But seals, joints and stuff tend to be weak points, so be careful…nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

    http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/pvc-cpvc-pipes-pressures-d_796.html

  • http://www.facebook.com/lahjik Scott McDaniel

    I’ve been thinking of two things, regarding this:
    1)  Could you improve the range a bit by machining the nozzle to provide “rifling” to cause the air flow to spin?
    2)  Supersonic Golf Ball Cannon…