Plan, prepare, record, share – have a checklist, test ahead of time
Making Cavitation Bubbles with Electricity | at 100 000 fps at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqnCZ5_iTC4
Going directly to cavitation, without first doing a simple air gap spark is a bit wasteful. You should have miniaturized it to reduce the total energy required. I do not remember hearing or seeing mention of ultrapure water, since the electric breakdown strength of water and its cavitation properties depend on the composition and purity, air and microbubble content of the water. The rotation was distracting. Perhaps you were exploring. Everyone seemed to be standing around in a new place. Making big multicamera experiments puts this way out of price range for most people. I think you ought to aim for universality – find experiments that everyone (hundreds of millions can understand it) can access, afford, learn and experiment with. You could have share the raw data. You could have done calculations (most of what you did not not new). You could have started with a theory and plan, expectations and specific things you wanted to capture. Getting started is hard. Learning is hard. Which is why it is best to start with calculations, properties, parameters, and plans. There are many ways to study the changes going on in the experiment at those short time frames. Oscilloscopes, photo-detectors, even ADCs now can go to 10s or 100s of GigaSamples per second. A spark gap under water can be reused and still put enough energy into local heating to create shock waves and changes in the water. That can be be pulsed repeatedly and a composite picture by phase (time relative to start) built up. There are likely more things that Chronos ring is suited for. Exploding wires have been around as long as sparks. Ultrasonic cavitation is easier I think. And you do not have to limit yourselves to water (ultrapure or acidified or salts). The details are the data, and I do not remember hearing any impulse to share the raw data. Looking at things is “eye candy”, not real science these days. If you run that Chronos, it probably was not cheap per shot – memory, electricity, staff, facility. Science is 99% preparation, and then processing the many many images to look closely at everything that happens. You could have experimented with switches and calculated what to expect — before hand. I like ElectroBoom shocking playfulness, but if you look closely, he is building a more and more complete model of how things work, how to calculate results, how to simplify and streamline his design process.
Filed as (Plan, prepare, record, share – have a checklist, test ahead of time)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
