I love Physics! Watch CD's flying around dorm room!

Click picture to watch the full CD experiment video.

Click picture to watch the full CD experiment video (1m28, 8mb), or check out the best exploding CD here. (6s 2.1mb)
 No one of harmed by the experiments, of course, thanks to the fact that on fragmentation, rotating objects break away at a direction perpendicular to their axis of rotation meaning that the entire room was peppered around the CD, but nothing behind or in front of its face could get hit.
 Several companies have made the maximum speed CD-Writing standard 48x (see article) instead of 52X or higher due to the fact that at 52x the CD is spinning at 10 000RPM and several CDs have been known to explode at those speeds, destroying the drive and some times sending pieces out from the CD tray. The fastest drivers on the market today employ multiple reading heads to achieve twice, or even 3 times the read rate for the same RPM, so until DVDs take over CD drives still have a lot of room for improvements. Just in case anyone is wondering: if a CD really was to spin at 35000RPM in the drive, it would be possible to read it at 175X :)
Update: Matt e-mailed me the following warning:

You'd think a CD could handle 52x, right? After all, they make drives that fast.... but apparently that's not in the Playstation black-disc spec. I tried playing GranTurismo on ePSXe, and it exploded right in the drive!
Shockingly, we all got hit with shards of CD (which were slowed down when they blew the faceplate off my CDROM drive), but the computer was fine, and the CDROM still works today, after dismantling it and removing all the shattered plastic.

- Matt Pierce

via powerlabs.org

Posted via web from snowbbdd's posterous

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