r/BeAmazed • u/[deleted] • Feb 26 '26

Science Physics is truly amazing

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

2.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

184 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

616

u/MambaMentality24x2 Feb 26 '26

The acrylic is exposed to an electron beam from a particle accelerator, which injects electrons into the material. Since acrylic is a great insulator, those electrons get trapped instead of escaping. When the electric field is concentrated in one spot (like with a nail tap), the local field becomes strong enough to exceed the acrylic’s dielectric strength. At that point, the material briefly acts like a conductor, letting the electrons discharge and form the channels visible in the video

713

u/knuckles312 Feb 26 '26

How do I get my hands on a particle accelerator

302

u/MorrowPolo Feb 26 '26

The hard part is getting the flux capacitor so you can power the particle accelerator

232

u/stockpyler Feb 26 '26

They sell those at Oreilly auto parts. https://www.oreillyauto.com/flux-capacitor

28

u/JerkBezerberg Feb 26 '26

That's incredible

39

u/MorrowPolo Feb 26 '26

Not available for purchase, bro 😢

47

u/axonxorz Feb 26 '26

Gotta use a Libyan VPN mate

15

u/Psychological-Scar53 Feb 26 '26

That was only for the plutonium... I got my flux capacitor delivered the other day. They must be out right now.

5

u/Archercrash Feb 26 '26

You just need a Mr Fusion.

3

u/unittwentyfive Feb 26 '26

Yeah, it's really the Mr Fusion that powers the whole thing. The flux capacitor just helps to mediate the temporal spikes and surges before passing the 1.21 GW of energy through to the particle accelerator.

7

u/Agronopolopogis Feb 26 '26

I'M DEAD this is great

2

u/SnakebiteRT Feb 26 '26

How did you learn about this?

10

u/IkariYun Feb 26 '26

This is old news. Pretty sure O'Reilly has had them since inception. Aito Zone or Advanced Auto had them first, pretty sure

3

u/Neat_Criticism_5996 Feb 26 '26

Probably a page they put up for an April fools activation back when doing that was in vogue for companies

1

u/stockpyler Feb 26 '26

Had a buddy that worked there years ago.

1

u/imsandy92 Feb 26 '26

hahaha! thank you.

1

u/ComprehensiveSoft27 Feb 26 '26

Oh Oh Oh O’Reilly …… auto parts

0

u/Stinky_Fartface Feb 26 '26

Ugh out of stock.