In the newest Slow Mo Guys video, they shot eggs. I’m completely ignorant on why either egg explodes towards the path of the bullet. After it’s shot, you can see an even “explosion” in both directions. Why? What causes the egg to move in the opposite direction of the bullet. Please eli5.
In: 4
As the bullet arrives at the egg it needs to push the egg material out of its way. This material then needs to occupy some other place than it was before, but there is other egg material in its way. Egg pushes on egg, but eventually there is a path where there is no egg resisting its movement, which can be back along the direction of the incoming bullet.
To simplify, the bullet pushes some egg in its direction of travel and some sideways. The egg that goes sideways pushes some in its direction of travel (sideways from the bullet) and some sideways again (some along the path of the bullet, some backwards from the bullet’s path). This second sideways path has no more egg to push and escapes into open air.
This is what happens when you fire a projectile into a liquid object. Eggs are a solid shell with liquid inside – the yolk and the white- which is 90% water. Water is a non-compressible substance, so when the bullet hits the liquid of the egg, it causes an explosion inside the egg. The liquid will attempt to expand anywhere it can, in this case, being the hole in the shell made by the bullet. This causes the blowback towards the bullet.
Interestingly, this is why a person can die by getting shot in the arm, leg or other non-vital organ by a high-velocity bullet, even if it’s a small size. The water in the blood instantly expands to absorb the shock of the bullet, rupturing blood vessels in the body and possibly the brain. It’s called hydrostatic shock.
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