Eyeballs vs. Bullets in SlowMo - Smarter Every Day 26

[music] Hey, it's me, Destin. When my granddad was young, he lost an eye playing cowboys and Indians, so tonight I'm gonna show you why you should always wear safety glasses or goggles when you're doing an experiment. This isn't very popular because I've been hiding something pretty weird inside my refrigerator for about 5 months.

By now you've figured out that I have a wife who tolerates me, and I love her very much. One thing that she's been tolerating for the past five months is a set of cow eyeballs that I've been keeping in the refrigerator. I'm now probably the world-renowned expert in eyeball juggling. These cow eyeballs are to make a humorous video, and by humorous I don't mean funny. Vitreous humor is a liquid that is inside of your eye, and when you were younger, you looked up at the sky, and you had that nice monochromatic background and a real small pupil because it was bright, and you saw these things floating around in your eye. Those are what I call floaties.

This is your eyeball. Now you'll notice there's fluid on the inside. When you rotate your eyeball, the fluid tends to stay in the same position due to its inertia. So even though the floater's on the inside, in this case a fish, he doesn't move because the fluid isn't moving. That's why when you see a floater when you're looking at the sun, it's so hard to track because it moves at some erratic pattern based on the fluid velocity, not necessarily the eyeball velocity.

We have goggles, and there's no stopping us now. So I've got a Phantom V10 high-speed camera. It's set up using a technique called the long flash technique. So here's a flash, and I've aligned on a cow eyeball using a laser that is put in the muzzle of the rifle. We're using this piezoelectric transducer to trigger a quantum composer pulse generator to trigger it at the proper time to illuminate and give us some really cool footage. That looks weird, but I like it.

Bullet vs. cow eye... [bang] Alright, here's the bullet. You can see a little smoke trail behind it. Urgh. That's pretty nasty. Oh, that's cool. It kind of blew up, but the musculature on the outside held it together. So what happens here, it actually hasn't exited yet, so the bullet is inside the eyeball.

Oh man, total destruction. And so that's what happens in less than a millisecond. This time the lens came out, and you can see around the edges of it where the ciliary body connects. I might just pop the end off there... yeah.

I forgot to trigger the camera. But, I did make a cool spiral galaxy out of vitreous humor. Oh, you gotta see this, the lens popped out. If I was Bear Grylls, I'd eat this. It all stayed together. Oh, look at that.

Alright, this thing is called the ciliary body. It's just behind the lens. Oh man. If this doesn't burn vitreous humor into your mind, I don't know what will. Take away: always wear eye protection. People will make fun of you, but be smarter than them.

So I hope you found my video humorous. Ahh, see what I did there? If you did, please subscribe, and also consider this other channel they're called the Slomoguys. They're in the UK, they do cool stuff too. They have Phantoms, and they do really neat experiments. They just talk a little funny.

But anyways, I hope you're getting Smarter Every Day, and tell your friends. We'll see you next week. [Captions by Andrew Jackson] captionsbyandrew.wordpress.com Captions in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.