13 Pieces Of Witchcraft That Are Actually Science

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1. Here we witness the birth of a T-1000.

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What's Actually Happening: A solar furnace (also sometimes called a Fresnal Mirror) concentrates sun rays into a focal point that can reach up to a temperature of 5,430 ºF, hot enough to melt steel in a couple seconds.

2. omfg sentient rope

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What's Actually Happening: "The rope is being driven on the wheel that it's placed on at the beginning of the gif. The guy then flicks it off the wheel and it is still spinning when it hits the ground and so it starts moving, much like a tire would if it was spinning and all of a sudden it the ground. But where the tire would just keep moving, the rope does not have that same structure so it just collapses in on itself while it's rolling." - suspendersarecool

3. All I see is proto-invisibility cloak technology.

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What's Actually Happening: They're polyacrylamide beads which have the same refractive index as the water making them essentially invisible.

4. I CAN BREAK BOTTLES WITH MY MIND, I AM AN X-MEN.

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What's Actually Happening: "So you start off by hitting the bottle hard on the top. The bottle moves downwards immediately but the water in the bottle doesn't instantly accelerate to keep up. This creates a near vacuum at the bottom, an extremely low-pressure void which is those "bubbles" you see there.The other poster is right up to that point, but what happens next is even more insidious. After the bottle stops moving from the initial jolt, the water is ruled by the difference between the pressure in the atmosphere and the utter lack of pressure below it, and moves down very quickly. But since there's nothing between the water and the bottle to cushion it, not even air, the entire bottle's worth of water hits the bottom with the pressure of our atmosphere behind it.Since water is basically incompressible, all that force gets transferred to the bottom of the bottle, an effect known as a water sledgehammer." - GrinningPariah

5. This ball is a a real life Wiley E. Coyote.

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What's Actually Happening: The ball is shot out of an air cannon at the same speed at which the truck is moving causing 0 horizontal velocity meaning it will simply drop straight to the ground.

6. WATERBENDING OMFG I SEE U KATARA!

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What's Actually Happening: A stream of water is exposed to an audio speaker emitting a 24 hz sine wave and shot with a camera that's recording at 24 frames per second.

7. ........somebody just reversed this gif right?

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What's Actually Happening: Laminar flow bro. Basically what's happening is that the dyed corn syrup is flowing in parallel layers with no crossing of the streams, the low velocity at which it's flowing (bring turned) allows the layers to slide past each other like playing cards. Reversing the direction at the same velocity occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between the layers allows the layer s to "unlayer" so to speak.

8. Is that....pouring....up?

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What's Actually Happening: "The viscosity of the liquid is the key part. The effect is like a siphon, where the lower down liquid can transmit (via the viscosity) some of it's energy to pull the upper part over the rim of the beaker." - Gusfoo

9. Nothing freezes this quickly outside of Disney movies.

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What's Actually Happening: "The water in the glass has been cooled down to below freezing point. However, seeing as how it's been done carefully, in a very clean glass, it's had no seed for any ice crystals to form, so it continues to jostle around in the liquid state (albeit very unwillingly). Add the ice-cube, suddenly you have a seed, and because the water it already well below freezing point, it all latches straight onto the growing ice crystal." - sumebrius

10. This is how the Cave of Wonders began.

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What's Actually Happening: "The speaker induces oscillations onto the plate, which then oscillates itself. Depending on the speaker frequency, the plate vibrates in different so called eigenmodes, the shapes you can see." - daLuiz

11. up.....hill......waves..........

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What's Actually Happening: "The waves happen when 2 layers of dissimilar fluids experience opposite velocities. The denser salt water (red) on the bottom wants to flow downwards and displaces the lighter regular water. The waves are a result of the 2 layers of water flowing in opposite directions of each other (known as the Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability)." - JlyGrnGiant

12. You'll never leave this island alive Mr. Bond.

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What's Actually Happening: "It's a thick copper wire. The copper wire has a current running through it which creates a magnetic field. The magnetic field goes through the metal in the center and creates a current through that metal. This current causes a resistance and alas, this resistance generates heat (enough of it to melt the metal, also known as induction heating)." - astrothug

13. THOR'S HAMMER IS REAL!!!!

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What's Actually Happening: The acrylic sheet is blasted with electrons, but because the acrylic sheet is a very good insulator, the electrons stay trapped with no place to go, until a nail is gently tapped with the hammer. The sharp point of the nail opens up a path for the electrons to escape and all the electrons rush along the path of least resistance damaging the acrylic sheet as they go. Viola, you have a lightening sculpture, aka a Lichtenberg figure.