What do you do when you have time, thousands of dollars worth of magnets, and you love Mythbusters? Science. At least, science with a flair for the dramatics. The myth that a magnetic wristwatch with today’s technology can stop, or even redirect, a bullet is firmly busted. The crew at [K&J Magnetics] wanted to take their own stab at the myth and they took liberties.
Despite the results of the show, a single magnet was able to measurably alter the path of a projectile. This won’t evolve into any life-saving technology because the gun is replaced with an underpowered BB gun shooting a steel BB. The original myth assumes a firearm shooting lead at full speed. This shouldn’t come as any surprise but it does tell us how far the parameters have to be perverted to magnetically steer a bullet. The blog goes over all the necessary compromises they had to endure in order to curve a bullet magnetically and their results video can be seen below the break.
Here we talk about shooting airplane guns so they don’t get mislead after leaving the barrel, and some more fun weaponry from minds under Churchill’s discretion.
Technically, its not a bullet, its a BB.
Technically, BB is still a bullet.
Practically, no one cares, showed principle stands true no matter how your are going to call your ferromagnetic projectile, you just need to remember about the condition that the higher passing speed is the stronger magnet you will need to use.
The “under-powered” part seems important as well. Now if we had a black-hole handy things might be different.
If you had a black hole handy you would have a much bigger problem than getting shot.
Because space-time is curved, the bullet would appear to be going in a straight line…I think.
Depends on where the event horizon is.
Depends where you’re standing as the the observer. It’s all relative, you know. ;) If you’re close enough to see the path appear straight, then you’re goin’ down too.. or at least your body is. (You were already dead from the tidal taffy stretching and fried from the gamma & X from all the other stuff going in first.)
Yeah, but steel bbs can kill at high velocities, and they could scale things up and use steel jacketed rounds
Whatever … will still need a “firearm” license in Australia …
As I’ve expected, they’ve pumped that Crossman airgun only once – normal shot takes 8 pumps. With one pump it’s about as powerful as a 6mm airsoft gun.
That was great, so what if it was a bb, science! also lol at the discussion above that turned into how you would see things move towards the event horizon of a black hole
I hear bullets get peculiar trajectory properties when fired near Kennedys.
Perhaps if there is a Kennedy on one side and a magnet on the other it would work?
Alright I did the experiment but unfortunately in the process somehow the Kennedy got shot by a second bullet.
It’s always something isn’t it, sigh.
if you want to combine guns and magnets, they should have built a rail gun…
If you look through their previous videos, they did build several different styles of gauss guns.
Nothing like “cracking the whip” to keep the neighbors up.
It reminds me of mass spectrometry…ionize the atoms…and the magnetic field curves the ions more or less depending on the mass of their isotopes……you could probably do the same thing with different mass or percentage of iron in the BB…
It reminds me of mass spectrometry…ionize the atoms…and the magnetic field curves the ions more or less depending on the mass of their isotopes……you could probably do the same thing with different mass or percentage of iron in the BB…
I think if the direction you want to curve is down, and your magnet is strong enough, you can divert any metal bullet.
There is a limit on the magnetic field you can achieve.
Especially when you want to not destroy the planet or solar system.
Is it just me or when people refer to the ‘Wanted’ movie curved bullets as a ‘myth’, does anyone else get mad at it’s been 350 years since Newton and the state of education in the world (and especially among Hollywood film writers) is so bad that the premise of such a thing could have ever been conceived?
I feel the same way about the movie ‘San Andreas’ where buildings toppled like dominoes instead of crumbling straight down. I mean I can wrap my head around no screen writer has ever taken high school physics; but never seen the videos from 9/11? Come on!
The movie Wanted ground my gears for one reason. I couldn’t get behind their suspension of disbelief. Superhero movies start with the premise that these folks have powers which spit in the eye of physics. Wanted tried to make it seem that a boost of adrenaline was all that was needed to perform the impossible. If you look at Wanted as, “These folks are gunslinging Jedi,” it should be easy to accept.
So the magnets curved it like gravity?