As a kid in Florida with nothing better to do, we used to conduct our own experiments with 2 liter coke bottles. We’d shake them really hard and then toss them high in the air over some pavement. 3/5 times they would bounce (and usually get dented). The other 40% of the time they would explode with great gusto.
I can’t confirm that our soda bottles were made out of the same type/thickness of plastic, but the one in the video reacted exactly like the bottles we used to play with as kids.
I should add that while I don’t remember how high we could toss them, we were probably in the first grade. I have a feeling that Cain’s 80 mph pitch has a lot more force behind it than gravity pulling the bottle down 20 ft or so.
The baseball he pitched would probably have somewhere around 65# kinetic energy. If the plastic does not stretch as mentioned in an above post it would put more # per square inch pressure on the bottle depending on how full it was. I would think a momentary rise to 200# pressure in the bottle would not be unthinkable.
Not always, but it wasn’t uncommon for more than half the bottle to be unaccounted for.
I can’t guarantee this isn’t doctored, but the footage looks too dated to be fake:
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As baseball weighs just over five ounces. The force Cain could hit the bottle with, even if he throws way harder than it appears he’s throwing, is not remotely comparable to the force of a four pound bottle of soda slamming into the ground from a fall of 3-4 storeys.
It’s been a while since I did this kind of math, so hopefully some math-centric Dopers can check my calculations. I cheated and used the internets for some help.
Assuming a story is 4 meters, the energy just before the force of impact is 354.368 J. Since the bottle is exploding, I assume that distance traveled equals 0. Since my cheat sheet requires a value greater than zero, let’s go with 0.1. That leaves us with a force of impact of 3543.68 N.
I’m going to assume that the baseball is traveling at 80 mph (35.7632 m/s), as that’s a reasonable speed for one of MLB’s brightest stars. A baseball weighs 0.148kg, so our force comes to 189.292 N.
By those calculations it doesn’t even come close to comparing, but surely I’m missing something by not including the internal pressure of the carbonated soda bottle?
Here’s a video of someone shooting a 2 liter bottle filled with compressed air using a .22 rifle. The effect is similar to that in the OP’s video.
Using more internets, I found the bullet’s weight to be 0.002592kg. It’s traveling at 228.6 m/s. That should leave us with a force of 135.45 N -less than our baseball calculations?
Note that the videos linked show the person on top of the building throwing the bottle down. I’d add a good 10mph or more to the speed of the “dropped” bottles.
Also, note that unlike interaction between the bottle and the planet, in which the collision is total, the interaction between the baseball and the bottle will be - except in the most extreme lucky case - a glancing blow ie the baseball will still have velocity after the collision.
The bullet case is not relevant - it is such a small object that it is going to apply a phenomenal point pressure that will split the plastic.
There’s a lot of videos on youtube of kids hitting water bottles with baseball bats and sometimes getting the same effect. The bottle remnants go somewhere, but they can be obscured by the mist. In a slow motion of the Cain video, something shoots off behind the mist but I can’t tell if it’s the baseball or a chunk of bottle. Not sure how much force a kid with a bat is hitting with but they don’t appear to be very powerful. They’re all water bottles though, I didn’t see any with 2 liter soda bottles, but a shaken soda bottle has a lot of pressure.
Not exactly a smoking gun, but signs of a conspiracy: The two Mythbusters are in the little seen short Patxi Pizza “52 Weeks of Giving” promotional video. Cain is associated with Patxi Pizza, the Mythbusers are associated with Patxi Pizza, the pizza busting video is prominently displayed on the Patxi website and it brags how Cain threw a ball threw their pizza. Finally, in this promo video, the park that they show looks like the park in the pizza busting video, coincidence? Like they say, “follow the money”!
That has to be fake. There’s no way a bottle would explode like that from so little applied force. The plastic they’re made of is strong. It’s like literally impossible to tear it unless you heat it first.
I’m not sure–need it necessarily be the case that a bullet shot from a gun has greater force than a thrown baseball? The damage from the bullet comes not just from the force but from the pressure, right? And the bullet being so small, and pointed, would make its pressure a lot greater, wouldn’t it?
I’m not sure - I *want *to say that generic 2L bottles are made from a much cheaper (and thinner) plastic. I believe I saw an episode on Mythbusters where they were trying to do something similar (or maybe it was the pressurized 2L backpack rocket episode), and they pointed out the distinction.
I don’t see how this says anything one way or another about it being fake, though. How does having a hole punched in the box add any additional advertising clout than if they just showed the pizza box before throwing it in the air?
As to the video, I don’t know whether it’s fake or not. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for no real reason, and when clicking frame by frame, it sure looks real. I know that this can be done with CGI, but if it is, it’s done very well, as you even see some pizza mist shoot out of the side of the box when the hole is punched (which you can clearly see). When the pizza box is opened at the end, you see the side of the box the spray came out of is indeed coated with sauce.
In those videos, the bottle is not bursting. The cap is just blowing off. There are lots more videos like that online and that seems to be the typical way those bottles fail.
You took the words right out of my mouth. The way they shoot up like rockets indicates that the cap is gone.
I just linked to that to illustrate how much pressure is in a shaken 2 liter. In videos of kids hitting water bottles, the water sometimes makes a big mist. Unfortunately there were no videos of anyone doing the same with soda, but I’d imagine the pressure would help make an even nicer mist, if you could bust a 2 liter.
Prominently displayed? It’s in their “Latest News” blog section which I’m sure no one ever reads and it’s an embedded youtube video with the same text from the original youtube video. It actually doesn’t say it’s their pizza. It doesn’t even say anything about pizza.
I am sorry, I should have specified Facebook page. On their Facebook page it mentions Matt Cains name a lot, which makes sense since he does promotional work for them (they have a pizza named after him, they give away autographed jerseys) and they provide links to the pizza busting video on two days with the following descriptions: “That’s a very familiar-looking pizza box that Matt Cain throws a fastball through!” and “Check out the viral Matt Cain video with our pizza on KRON 4 News’s wall!” Ok, so they mention Matt Cain’s name over a dozen times on their facebook page, they direct people to the video from their facebook page, the two mythbusters engage in promotional/fundraising activities with the pizza company, the park in the pizza busting video is the same as the pizza company’s promotional video, and there is someone that wants to argue that this is not a promotional viral video? C’mon, the mythbuster girl says “I say we do a deep dish” instead of pizza! Paxti is a Chicago style deep dish pizza restaurant.
Sure, you can argue that just because this is a video put out by a company to promote their pizza doesn’t guarantee that the stunts in it are fake, but it sure makes it seem like it. A video of Matt Cain knocking down a bunch of pizza boxes lined up on a picnic table wouldn’t go viral, but a video of Matt Cain throwing a ball up against gravity at pizza thrown up in the air and making a clean hole through it would.
