If bullets are so hot when coming out of a gun, why do they not cauterize the entrance wound that they create?
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The bullet is going so fast there is no time to cauterize the entrance, and the heat gets dissipated, spread out, fast due to animals being full of water.
the burning gunpowder is only in contact with the base of the bullet for a fraction of a second, not enough time to transfer all that much heat. while a bullet indeed gets hot after firing, it doesn’t get quite up to cauterizing temperature.
Speed and not enough heat.
The bullet generally only touches the skin for a fraction of a second — even if it gets stuck in the body, the bullet was never *red hot* so there’s just not enough heat to do anything.
same reason you can run your finger through a candle flame and it doesn’t burn… unless you do it real slow. heat transfer takes time.
You don’t cauterize the entrance to a wound. You cauterize the various blood vessels below the surface. If a surgeon were to cauterize your wounds, they’d do so with the equivalent of a soldering iron to precisely close those specific vessels.
Bullets entering the body are extremely hot due to the air friction they experienced on the transit over. So they could potentially cauterize those blood vessels… if they were in contact with them for long enough.
However, there are two issues:
– ‘Contact with’. The bulk of a damage a bullet does isn’t in the vicinity of the bullet but due to the shockwave the bullet creates throughout your body. This shockwave is tearing blood vessels well away from the bullet and when someone ‘bleeds out’, the blood is normally coming from places relatively far away from the actual bullet.
– ‘Long enough’. Even in situations where high velocity bullets go ‘through and through’, the bullet itself is traveling so fast that it isn’t in contact with the broken vessels long enough to cauterize them.
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