The safe was dangling 170 feet in the air, stuffed with cash, and Mark Rober had just told nobody what was directly beneath it. That single image captures everything about what happens when you put a military-grade laser, a four-foot Tesla coil, and a crossbow in the same building and call it a science competition. The stakes here go beyond bragging rights: this is a genuine head-to-head test of two of nature’s most destructive forces, run across seven objects with real consequences, and the results are genuinely not what anyone predicted.
Rober assembled two collaborators for the showdown. Science Bob Pflugfelder, a former middle school teacher who now wields military-grade laser equipment, represented lasers. Mehdi Sadaghdar, known online as ElectroBOOM, arrived from Canada with a four-foot Tesla coil and a welder capable of pushing 750 amps, representing lightning. Rober himself competed as a third entry under the banner of the X factor, using a different destruction method for each of the seven objects.
Seven objects, three very different approaches to destruction
The opening round used CDs from the competitors’ personal collections. Pflugfelder’s laser folded Rod Stewart’s greatest hits like a taco before reducing it to ash. Sadaghdar’s Tesla coil etched gorgeous arcing patterns into a Chris De Burgh disc, though it also managed to shock Sadaghdar twice in the process. Rober’s method was a microwave fitted with googly eyes, which produced a dramatic light show but left the round’s point going to lightning.
Round two, a solid block of ice, exposed a real physics limitation: because ice is largely transparent, the laser passed straight through without being absorbed. Pflugfelder had to rough up the surface first before the beam could build enough heat to bore a narrow hole. Sadaghdar ran 650 amps through a rebar rod to create what he described as a hot knife through butter, though the rebar bent before completing the cut. When both blocks were dropped to test structural damage, Sadaghdar’s cleaved cleanest. Lightning went two points ahead.
The lamp round flipped the brief entirely, asking each competitor to create a lamp rather than destroy one. Pflugfelder illuminated a container of ultraviolet-reactive slime with a sparkle-pattern laser filter. Sadaghdar held a fluorescent tube near the Tesla coil’s electric field and watched the gas inside ignite without any physical connection, producing what looked, in his words and everyone else’s immediate reaction, like an actual lightsaber battle. Rober attempted a lava lamp filled with actual lava. The lava gods were not on his side. Laser earned its first point.
The lipo battery round introduced Rober’s crossbow. After Pflugfelder’s laser burned cleanly through the casing and Sadaghdar’s shorting attempt was foiled by an internal battery failsafe that nobody had accounted for, Rober’s metal dart punctured all battery layers from a distance that was, in his words, ‘physically impossible to miss.’ The resulting electron stampede produced clean flames. X factor opened its account.
The crystal ball round produced the competition’s loudest moment. After the laser created a pleasant double-rainbow light show with no structural effect, and Rober’s golf-club firearm left only surface cracks, Sadaghdar connected a capacitor capable of delivering 100,000 amps to the globe. The result converted the glass into what he called ‘metallicized glass.’ Nobody argued the point award.
The watermelon round went to Rober after liquid nitrogen turned the fruit into a ceiling-decorating explosion, leaving Pflugfelder’s laser-cut inch-deep groove and Sadaghdar’s capacitor-cracked rind well behind.
The vault drop that settled everything
The final round centered on a reinforced safe filled with cash. Whoever extracted the most money would win the round and, given the scoreline, potentially the championship. Pflugfelder’s laser cut through the locking mechanisms cleanly but incinerated almost all the cash in the process, recovering roughly 25 cents. Sadaghdar’s 31,000-watt arc cutter made faster work of the steel but burned through the money even faster, recovering less than Pflugfelder.
Rober dropped the safe from 170 feet. The door cracked on the first drop and flew off its hinges on the second, sending hundreds into the open air. The wind complicated the final tally considerably.
Sadaghdar put it plainly after watching the cash scatter: ‘My money! Come on, man. That’s too late.’
Final score: X factor three points, lightning two, laser one.
Chris De Burgh’s CD, somewhere on the CrunchLabs floor
A burned Chris De Burgh disc sits somewhere in the CrunchLabs building, its arcing Tesla coil patterns still faintly visible on what remains of the surface.
The safe door, meanwhile, came off its hinges on the second drop and landed somewhere near a pile of scattered hundreds that nobody had quite finished counting when the wind picked up.
