MythBusters Episode 124: Curving Bullets
Air Date: June 10, 2009
A shooter can curve a bullet around an obstacle by swinging or flicking his or her arm. (Based on scenes from the movie Wanted.)
busted
The Build Team first went to a shooting range and set up a target with a wooden obstacle halfway between themselves and the target. Grant, Tory, and Kari each attempted to imitate the movie characters and shoot a bullet from a handgun around the obstacle by swinging the gun in an arc as they shot. No one was able to accomplish the feat. To continue testing, the team created a robot that could swing a gun at superhuman speeds. They set up a row of five large planes of paper, each parallel to the others to help determine the bullets’ paths. After each shot, they used a laser pointer to see if all five of the holes lined up. Even with the gun being swung by the robot, the bullet paths were completely straight. Finally, the team tried modifying the gun and bullets. With a de-rifled gun barrel and unbalanced bullets, the bullets tumbled through the air but still flew along a straight path.
The sonic boom or shockwave from a supersonic bullet can break glass.
busted
To test this myth, Adam and Jamie used a .50 caliber rifle capable of shooting bullets at 1,984 mph (3192 km/hr), well above the speed of sound. They set up a series of glass panes, stemware, and light bulbs surrounding the path of the bullet. Even with the bullet passing within inches of the glass objects, nothing broke as a result of the passing bullet.
The sonic boom from a supersonic fighter jet will break glass.
busted
Adam and Jamie teamed up with the Navy’s Blue Angels to test this myth. Adam first received some subsonic flight training in an FA-18; despite passing out and vomiting at various times, he enjoyed the experience. To operate at supersonic speeds, they had to go to a restricted zone due to FAA rules. At the test site, the MythBusters built a small cabin with a glass window in addition to parking a car and leaving a table with lots of glass objects on it. When a Blue Angel jet, with Adam aboard, flew by at supersonic speed and with 8,000 feet of altitude, barely a sound was heard. At 2,000 feet, a loud boom was heard but no glass was broken. The jet continued to make lower and lower passes, ultimately making five passes at just 200 feet. The house’s window was broken from these passes, but nothing else was broken. Because of the extremely unlikely circumstance of a 200-foot supersonic jet pass, and the minimal damage observed, this myth was declared busted.
Newer: Episode 125: Car vs. Rain
Older: Episode 123: Prison Escape
Hi everybody!
HOW TO BEND A BULLET……a large enough magnetic field would cause the trajectory of the bullet to bend. Gravity is mild compared to what can be created in a particle accelerator such as the one in Batavia Il. called Fermi lab. Super strong magnets that’ll bend bullets….I got a buck on it…..
I bet John Hutchison can do it…..
June 11, 2009 at 7:46 PMUmm….the Mythbusters already tried this and only with steel bullets and very very strong magnets was it possible. The “curved bullet” myth was from the movie “Wanted”.
June 11, 2009 at 8:50 PMSomebody here is a noob who doesn’t watch enough mythbusters, or know anything about bullets, or magnetism. Also, you call gravity mild, then how come every time you shoot a gun in the air, gravity bends it ~180 degrees.
June 11, 2009 at 9:46 PMKyle I hate to burst your bubble ,but gravity is one of the weakest forces in nature.From our perspective it appears quite strong. But man made magnetism surpasses gravity by far in strength
June 12, 2009 at 10:56 AM.Does anyone else want to chime in on this one?
If the magnetic force could be applied to it for an extended period of time, then it could definitely have a major impact on the trajectory of the bullet. But when you have a magnet that sits in one place, it can only exert force on the bullet for a very very small amount of time.
So even with a very strong magnet, the amount of trajectory change will be minimal. Gravity has no problem affecting the trajectory because it’s constant force on the bullet.
June 12, 2009 at 3:26 PMJeff & Slave, look at the magnetic properties of bullet materials (lead and copper are common). These materials are not significantly affected by a magnetic field. Therefore, the magnet should have no impact on the trajectory even if applied over longer distances. This assumes that the bullet is neutrally charged. If somehow you could apply a static charge to the bullet (and keep it there during flight), the Lorentz force would apply and you might see something interesting with sufficiently large E and B fields applied over a sufficient amount of time.
June 16, 2009 at 12:22 PMIt is not realistic to put a static charge on a bullet. You will need a large amount of charge to curve a bullet even in large E and B fields. Even if you were able to create this charge on a bullet,
June 17, 2009 at 6:55 PMI bet the bullet wouldn’t be able to leave a gun, because the charge on a bullet would induce the charge on a gun.
Curving a bullet with a magnetic field is also problematic even if you make the bullet from steel. First, Jeff comment is correct. Second, the conventional static magnets create magnetic fields decaying much faster with distance than Coulomb field (magnets are magnetic dipoles, field scales as 1 over r^3 with distance r). So not only you need a huge magnet but you need to keep it very close to the bullet.
I guess, the only reasonable solution would be to make a bullet with wings and use aerodynamics.
I know this is off the topic but what about the part about the bath of wax? does it really stimulate white blood cells?
June 26, 2009 at 11:52 PMthe Germans in WW2 invented a rifle with a curved barrel so they could shoot around corners , so in theory the bullet did curve
June 27, 2009 at 5:45 AMBtw this show is terrible. But Gravity is one of the strongest forces depends on what measure you use. It can have an effect over the longest range of all the forces. But yes, its close range effects are not as dramatic as the nuclear force or the electromagnetic force. But overall, if you take measurements at a certain distance, gravity could be considered longer. And someone being a noob because they do not watch the horrible show that mocks science every episode is a good thing form my point of view.
June 30, 2009 at 6:04 PMHey every one the subsonic jet breaking the glass is possible in Billings Montana a jet flew be well under 50 feet it blew out hundreds of car windows put hundreds of people in the hospital i know cause i was there and the key of breaking glass is breaking the sound barrier RIGHT above the glass mythbusters was going about 2000mph and not actually braking the sound barrier above the glass but miles back
June 30, 2009 at 7:11 PMCan you try the supersonic boom from a bullwhip?
July 1, 2009 at 1:23 PMHas anyone tried a round bullet,I know in the movie they were regular bullet shape but it would be interesting to see what happens.Think of a pitcher throwing a curve ball.Of course you might have to control the velocity of the round to get the result your looking for.I think this was the problem with your testing,the speed of the bullet was just to fast to effect it.Maybe thats why they shoot it in SLOW MOTION !!
July 2, 2009 at 11:52 AMHow much sound and explosions can Kari’s unborn child take?
There’s a theory that says:
If you are a pregnant woman and you want a calm and intelligent child, you should play classic music while you’re pregnant. That’s because the fetus can pickup up sound from the surrounding. It recognizes the mother’s voice and the father’s voice (if he’s been present during the pregnancy). The fetus is totally surrounded by liquid. And what happens in liquid? The sound and shock waves is traveling much easier and faster than in air. So Kari’s stomach acts like a big drum for the fetus inside.
So far, Kari has been doing gunshots and really big explosions with ear protections. That’s despite the fact that she’s been pregnant and carrying a 6-7 months fetus without any chance to wear ear protection on its own.
So I ask the question…
July 10, 2009 at 11:59 AM-How bad is this for Kari’s child. Will it sustain any problems while its growing up?
In theory, lets take the bullets and replace them with a baseball. If you were actually able to slow down time immensely, the only way to make it curve, is to spin the actual object to compensate for the wind. People throw sidearm and still trow the ball straight. In theory you could curve a bullet, you it would have to have an amount of spin(not spiral) on it in order to curve, at that point I doubt it would be effective.
July 13, 2009 at 4:46 PMWhen jet fighter breaks sound barier, it WILL BREAK all windows in the area, window breaking is not 100 percent but, it is at 80%. How do i know that-i happened to live in Sarajevo, Bosnia and in the begining of the conflict, mid april two MIG 29 jet fighters flew over my area of town and broke sound barrier. Very few were left with windows. They did flew very, very low.
July 13, 2009 at 9:24 PMI guess “Mythbusters experiment research team did do much research in the real world”
The size of the jet matters when causing a sonic boom. next time try a B-1b at 200 ft and see what a difference that would make.
July 14, 2009 at 7:46 PMThe only way to curve a bullet is to apply a force on it. No matter how much you wave your arms, the force during flight will not be affected, so it won’t curve.
Gravity does indeed curve flight (toward the centre of the planet), and a very very strong magnetic force and ferromagnetic bullet would work to pull it in any direction.
July 19, 2009 at 4:12 PMI agree completely with Tony !!!
July 20, 2009 at 6:48 AMA Baseball pitcher throws a curveball by gripping the ball a certain way. This grip, combined with the orientation of the ball’s stitches, determine how the ball will react in flight.
July 20, 2009 at 7:32 PMLarge storefront windows can break by a jet flying at supersonic speed above 30,000 by aiming the nose of the jet toward the window. I remember a town that gave a speeding ticket to a jet pilot years ago that lost a large window. It may have something to do with the resonant frequency of the larger windows.
July 20, 2009 at 8:00 PMSo this episode just came on recently and the thing that drove me CRAZY was that they said it was not possible when they were not even doing it right! I was fully expecting them to prove it wrong, but I expected them to at least flick their wrist yet not ONE of them did. It had nothing to do with how fast the bullet was supposed to go, but everything to do with how you flung your arm and wrist at the same time. They all flung their arm, but kept their wrist straight! GRRRRRR!!! Do it right next time. =(
July 22, 2009 at 3:34 AM@brittany.. don’t worry. it’s physically impossible so it doesn’t matter if they flick their wrists at superhuman speeds.
July 22, 2009 at 8:35 AMI couldn’t help but notice that some of the people here seem to think that gravity is one of the strongest forces. This is simply not true. Here are two reasons as to why: first: when you lift up your foot, you’ve got the entire mass of the Earth pulling against you. Yet you still can. That alone should be enough to prove that gravity is a weak force. Second, the distance that gravity has an effect, has nothing to due with how strong the force is. It has to due with the mass of the object. I have my own gravity, but things aren’t attracted to me because the force I exert on them is minutely small. The only reason that the Earth exerts a strong enough pull to keep an object like the moon in orbit, is because the Earth is massive.
As to the sonic boom myth, I’d imagine that the frequency of the sound produced, is more important then how loud it is. You might get glass broken due to shaking, but not much else.
July 31, 2009 at 9:32 PMSonic Boom: I am surprised that very little was heard from 8000 feet.
I have experienced 2 Sonic booms from the ground and both were very very loud and were both accompanied by quite a shock wave.
The first was at the Overberg Military airshow (South Africa), aircraft was a Mirage F 111 CZ at 25 000 feet. The 2nd was at the Africa Aerospace and Defence Show (Cape Town, South Africa) by a Lightning at over 20 000 feet. “the Lightnings broke through the sound barrier over the airfield, above 20 000 feet, creating two terrific sonic booms. While this had been announced and was expected, many did not expect the ferocity of the booms and the shockwave. It evidently rattled windows as far away as Durbanville! There were a number of complaints about this, but on the day, the “fors” were far greater than the “againsts”. “ from: http://www.saairforce.co.za/news-and-events/710/aad-2008-airshow-report . My view is that if it can rattle windows from 20 000 surely it can break them at lower altitudes.
Apparently though the hearing of a Sonic boom is very dependant on atmospheric conditions.
August 3, 2009 at 7:20 AMTwo rebuttals:
CURVING BULLET:
It’s simple physics. Once the bullet leaves the barrel it will travel in a straight line because there is no sideways force to change its direction. On top of that, barrels are rifled to spin the bullet so the gyroscope effect helps ensure they maintain a straight line. It will curve and eventually fall down to the ground because of the verticle force of gravity.
Baseballs have been shown to curve sideways because of the spin. The aerodynamic forces generated by the spinning ball can produce the needed side force. I doubt very much that sufficient spin could be applied to a spherical shot in a smooth bore gun.
SONIC BOOM:
In the 1950’s, the Canadian air force were demonstrating their new CF-100 fighter. This was totally designed and built in Canada and bore no relationship at all to the American F-100.
It was intended for high subsonic speeds, but as the pilot pulled out of a shallow dive the plane briefly went supersonic right above one end of an administration building. This 1-storey buildind was arranged as a simple rectangle with a straight central hall and offices opening off both sides of the hall. The shock wave blew the glass doors inward. It then travelled down the hall, blowing out the windows of any office whose door was open, until it blew out the glass doors at the other end of the hall. The building itself suffered significant structural damage.
I would suggest that a strong factor here is that the plane was never intended to go supersonic (for example, straight instead of swept wings) and so the shock wave would be quite a bit stronger than current fighters would produce.
I would suggest
August 10, 2009 at 3:09 PMThe best way to curve a bullet is to use the CornerShot Weapon System! Although it doesn’t curve a bullet it does however give you the same advantage.
August 14, 2009 at 11:33 PMi think you all should stop mouning geeeeezzz the boys put on a gud show if you want to proof them wrong get your own show and do it and Peter R if you dont like the show dont watch it and we dont realy care bout your opinion either go watch oprah or something, but for heavens sakes ppl either the myth is true or it aint so get over it .
August 15, 2009 at 6:53 AMoh and btw the best way to curve a bullet is to put your dvd player on and watch wanted !!!!!!!!!!
August 15, 2009 at 6:56 AMSteve I totally agree with you! M-Busters is great program. BTW, A chopped up version of our CornerShot is in the movie Wanted, but you probably know that already.
August 21, 2009 at 9:30 PMSonic Boom ..
It is possible for Windows to be broken by the Shockwave. I’ve seen Videos from loads of different countries, USA,AUS,RUS,UK,GER,FRA all showing windows being shattered by the shockwaves.
It is also possible for windows to shatter from Subsonic aircraft under power, B-52s in the USA, the Avro Vulcan in the UK and F-111s in Australia have all done it.
Lucky G*t for getting to fly with the Angels !!
August 29, 2009 at 7:28 AMGood show and it was good to see the result of the Wanted myth, I haven’t seen this episode yet.
And for my two cents on the gravity strength argument, I’d say gravity is weak. When you pick something up with a magnet, you have to overcome gravity, and the magnet’s only the size of a finger. Imagine a magnet the size and mass of earth…
September 2, 2009 at 5:45 AMHere’s to all of the people having problems with the curving bullets…watch the scene, and the bullet actually moves upwards…that deifies physics in itself. Just forget about everything anyone’s said about a magnetic field…the mythbusters have already tested that, and it requires about 13 rare earth magnets to affect the trajectory of a bullet. The whole point was that the motion of a person’s arms can curve a bullet…the bullet moves too fast to have any affect as it escapes the barrel, so myth busted.
September 14, 2009 at 3:03 PMThe blue angels themselves, broke every window in an eight block radius while practicing for a demonstation in Kelowna B.C. Canada in 1969
http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technology/aeronautics/clips/1220/
September 17, 2009 at 10:22 PMWith regard to a supersonic jet breaking windows: In 1959, at the opening of Uplands airport, in Ottawa, Canada, a pilot of an F-104 inadvertantly broke the sound barrier, breaking a number of windows in the new terminal building. The story can be found in Wikipedia, under the entry for “Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport”, as tit is now known
September 18, 2009 at 8:32 AMThe bullets do curve, in fact in two directions. One direction is downward …same as gravity. The second direction is the tangential direction created by “sweeping” the pistal from right to left (or left to right). The reason why Mythbusters could not prove or show a curving of the bullet using five layers of paper walls as a trajectory “tracking” device is that the walls were too close to the shooter relative to the bullet’s actual trajectory as affected by gravity and the tangential vectors. Consider an apparently flat surface area on Earth; yet, if you continue to extend that flat area to the horizon and beyond, you discover it actually curves (just like Columbus) …all the way around the Earth. I believe the trajectory tracking walls would show the curving due to gravity and the horizontal tangential vector if the walls were positioned at a much further distance …say a total of 1 sm. Of course the myth that even a superhero could curve a bullet the distance of more than the bullet’s width for every 100 feet of travel would still be busted.
October 7, 2009 at 10:36 PMyou guys are the coolest on your experents i liked the water experiment and the shark.
October 9, 2009 at 2:15 PMIn theory, a bullet could be curved. That is if it was round. The friction of the air, causes a normal bullet to fly straight. But, if a round bullet were used, then shot at the right angle, there wouldn’t be a single point where the friction of gravity and drag would affect it. Thusly, it would be curved.
October 10, 2009 at 3:58 PMengineers… what can I say, why dont you people hire some one who has actually done some of this stuff for real.My friend and I did go right over the swing right around, with wittness.Your science books are not part of the real world.We get you engineer type underground all the time. and they say [it cant be done] and we prove them wrong half the time.The trouble is none of you has ever worked for a living, real work.A regurgitation of a tex book does not cut in the real world. sorry to bruise your over inflated egos. some of us know better, all that schooling and you guys really dont know squat.
October 11, 2009 at 8:13 PMSonic boom- I noticed that the vehicle was parked directly in front of the only window that broke (front to rear with the rear in front of the window). Is it possible that the sound waves followed the aerodynamics of the car and focused them on that portion of the house with greater force? Could that be why only that window broke? Keep it up, your awesome!!
October 12, 2009 at 5:31 PMsimply the guys where only throwing there arms around, and not rotaiting the gun at the same time…
October 26, 2009 at 6:18 AMi wonder if in the movie wanted if the way the bullet were made made a differnce. By this i mean more then just unblanced but have a certain spriel that would cause the air to twist around it in such a way that would make it curve?
November 14, 2009 at 7:32 PMWell, bullets’ paths CAN be curved…they ARE curved by gravity. The kicker is, though, gravity is acting on the bullet even after it leaves the barrel. Swinging the gun around can’t affect the trajectory of the bullet after it’s left the barrel.
If the gun is moving when it fires, the bullet won’t go in a straight forward path. It’s like if you’re running sideways and throw a ball straight in front of you. it’ll go on a diagonal path from your motion, not perpendicular. But it will still fly straight diagonally, you wouldn’t be able to curve AROUND anything.
November 14, 2009 at 11:14 PMSonic Boom.
It looks like they flew past the window already at speeds above Mach 1. At that time sound is traveling in a coneshaped pattern. If you want to break the windows, you need to break the soundbarrier near the window. Now all the soundwaves are exactly focussed in one point, which makes it ampified and a loud bang will be heard, and your window is gone.
November 26, 2009 at 11:11 PMAbout 12-years ago at the RAAF Edinborough Airforce Base situated in salisbury/Adelaide South Australia.
During an Air Show at the Base one of the pilots on a low alttitude run unlawfully broke the sound barrier.
This boom created a major uproar in the local papers as it destroyed dozens of market garden green houses in Virginia.
A market garden growing area which was in the country side approx 5 miles away from the RAAF Base.
The green houses looked as though they had been in a giant hailstone storm.
The market gardeners were on the television news that night, furious, that there livelyhood had just been destroyed.
November 28, 2009 at 5:21 AMSo much for Yanks and ballistics!
A bullet/projectile does not travel in a two dimensional trajectory, it travels in a spiral.
That means that looking at the trajectory in plan view the bullet is traveling in a horizontal curve.
The bullet is a gyroscope,due to the natural
frequency of the rifle barrel it gets flicked sideways as it exits.When you apply a force to a
gyroscope it precesses / wobbles, check out Wikipedia for the mathematics.
To get a horizontal curve/spiral you would need to move the barrrel at a speed of similar magnitude to its natural frequency/ bong it with a hammer, and also shoot over several hundred yards.
November 28, 2009 at 6:48 AM