hey it's me destin welcome back to smarter every day we are right in the middle of a huge experiment it's kind of like you walked in halfway through class it's cool though there's a couple of videos you can watch and get caught up later but basically we built a giant air cannon that'll shoot a baseball faster than the speed of sound this thing was a massive undertaking that's honestly really kind of like the accumulation of my childhood love of baseball and my study of aerodynamics and my work as a developmental weapons tester this canon allows me to continue learning in a hands-on way about how things move at supersonic velocities which is not an easy thing to come by this cannon was a beast to design and build and the patrons of smarter every day paid for it for which i am very grateful and now i'm at that critical point where i want to start characterizing the canon and how it works meaning i'm learning how to dial it in so i can make a ball go exactly how fast i want it to go the ability to precisely control the velocity and timing of a baseball will let me do all kinds of other experiments so it's tempting to look at this as some kind of big youtube stunt but that is not what it is so today we're continuing our mission to graph the relationship between how the amount of air we jam into the cannon correlates with how fast the ball goes when that air pressure is released so we fill it up to a certain air pressure we pull the trigger two one and then we use high speed cameras and math to figure out how fast the ball exits the barrel and then we graph our data we have our first data point also we can measure how fast the ball decelerates so we can calculate drag on the baseball at different velocities these four high speed cameras give us amazing slow motion footage and allow us to quantify times distances and velocities so we can understand what's going on this is the largest setup i've ever done on smart everyday so trent's going to be helping run the four high-speed cameras and george is going to help document the entire process we only need like the first NUMBER_TOKEN feet of baseball flight for scientific purposes which means we don't really care what happens to the baseball after that so we asked the patrons of smarter every day for suggestions of interesting things we could hit with a supersonic baseball in the earlier video which is really part one of this video we shot a container of rainbow sprinkles and a jar of extra heavy mayonnaise which was surprisingly gross let's go get smarter every day and learn more about the supersonic baseball cannon
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN and the patrons of smarter every day paid for it for which i am very grateful and END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN