I’m very curious.
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A Prince Rupert drop is made by dropping molten glass in water. The fast cooling exterior shrinks against the still hot interior, creating internal tension that is set when the interior then cools. Now to break the glass, you need to overcome the force of all that tension to actually damage it. This is the principle behind “tempered glass” which is similarly difficult to break.
Amusingly, the best visual of this is when you actually do break the glass: If you snap the fragile tail of a PR drop (or crack a tempered glass panel), the whole thing explodes into shards. The outside glass no longer contains the tension from the inside glass, so the inside dumps all of its energy into the exterior cracks, causing the whole thing to fail catastrophically.
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