Most of this video - as is typical of videos from these ridiculous Aussies - can be skipped. It's primarily just repeated, slow motion footage of two giant air cannons firing random things (plastic dinosaurs, basketballs, cola cans, pumpkins, rubber band balls, spray paint cans, and such) at each other and ridiculous mugging for the camera.
But then - at 16:30 - they fire two glass balls at each other and something really interesting happens.
Well, at 16:30 they load the two glass balls and mug around for two and a half minutes before showing us the scientifically interesting slow motion video. Go ahead and skip to 19:00 to see the science.
I'll wait for you...
At 19:24 we get a flash of light when the two highly accelerated glass balls hit each other.
The flash of light certainly wasn't something that I expected to see and seems to be an example of triboluminescence (light produced from force or movement).
The initial science explanation (at 20:00 about IMFs being broken) seems a bit dodgy, and I'm really happy that they come back around 21:00 with something that sounds more correct to me.
I've never heard of glass causing triboluminescence (nor fractoluminescence which is a subset of triboluminescence, I guess), but I'd like to see somebody with way more science knowledge than I have explain what's happening here.
Thanks, by the way, to reddit for the gif.
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