Can You Slice Bullets Like Deadpool?

my god yes my microphones on we've been doing this for years I'm not just gonna hide behind b-roll like other you do okay okay if the mutant known as Deadpool had one signature movie move that wasn't some crude quip or fourth-wall break it would probably be slicing bullets in half deflecting them away from his body doing so immediately tells you just how fast and how strong the Merc with the mouth Wade Wilson must be but how fast and how skilled would you have to be to do the same and would you even want to we've seen Deadpool deflect and slice bullets before I'm hiding behind b-roll b-roll now and in Deadpool 2 bullet chopping is back but to evaluate this move scientifically we need to know three things first 10 bullets really be split in midair if they can how superhumanly agile do you have to be to do so and thirdly if you could do so would it even be a good idea first sauce 10 bullets really be sliced here the Vsauce entrances is murder on the knees in answering this first question we have a really fun opportunity to make theoretical predictions and then check them practically because people have already done the bullet slicing experiments so let's make a few assumptions and then check them the most common bullet in the world is the 9-millimeter bullet and it's 19 millimeters long it weighs 9 grams and it has a muzzle velocity on average across different weapons systems etc of around 350 meters per second now let's choose a cutting implement I'm gonna choose this very real and very sharp actual katana shut up now because of how thin this katana is and how much surface area this edge will be contacting on a bullet the diameter of that bullet the surface area that will be coming into contact with the bullet is necessarily going to be less then nine square millimeters now using all these variables we can plug it into an equation to get a cutting pressure which is good because we can check that cutting pressure against the strength of common bullet materials to see if they will stand up to said pressure slo-mo me [Music] they look cool energy over the distance that energy comes to a stop over the cutting area yeah it's not nearly as interesting in real time using I think are pretty reasonable numbers here we get a cutting pressure of three Giga Pascal's or three billion Newton's per square meter of surface area now this is higher tens of times higher than the yield strength of common bullet materials like lead or copper in fact it's a third of the pressure needed to form diamond so even if we are a little bit off on our numbers here something like a katana which I still have could easily theoretically speaking cut a pool but hey I'm just some discount Thor on the Internet why don't we check our work the bullet slicing experiment has been performed in many different ways by many different people and the conclusion is always the same which is great for science and that conclusion is yes knives axes and even yes katanas can slice their bullets in midair easily these weapons don't even have to be in motion so that's our first question answered but all this happens in just the blink of an eye so how fast would you actually have to be to get your blade in front of an incoming of an incoming bullet oh just a second hey Matt pet yeah how you doing man yeah you know no they're watching right now yeah yeah you should see him no they don't look like that close though yeah no yeah the collab yeah yeah no no no they're gonna have to wait forever even if you can slice a bullet in half you can only do so if you can react to that bullet before it gets to you so to answer our second question what kind of reaction times are we talking about here are you good on focus cheese or not Beauty vlogging let's use the most recent bullet cutting seen from the Deadpool 2 trailer to calculate reaction times let's put Josh swollen over here and Deadpool over here based on these actors Heights in this scene it looks like the characters are less than 2 meters apart and if that's the case and Josh swollen over here fires a 9-millimeter bullet out of his gun then simple division using muzzle velocity says that from the moment of firing jeez Thanos chill out give me a second from the moment of firing Deadpool at this distance would have just 5 milliseconds to respond at the scale of single milliseconds even if Deadpool can block a single bullet it's incredibly impressive because the process of recognition and reaction usually takes a lot longer yeah for example when Deadpool's eyes register incoming light from the bullet that visual information is sent to his occipital lobe which then routes that information to his frontal lobes which make a decision on whether or not to act on that visual information that information is then routed to his motor cortex which sends a signal to his spinal cord yeah and then to his arms finally to start moving and make that bullet slicing movement in humans this usually takes around 250 milliseconds which is forty-four times longer then Deadpool has to respond in that trailer it's not all in my head sometimes need a good healthy boy given the difference between the reaction time that would be necessary to block bullets at our assumed distance and human reaction time superhuman reflexes would have to be another one of Deadpool's superpowers but it's not a power so super that it's not possible recently a study out of Cornell University was looking into the fastest reaction times in the animal kingdom and they found that one of the fastest may belong to the humble fruit fly they found that a fruit flies reaction time is just five milliseconds which definitely contributes to why they are so hard to swat so bullet blockers like Deadpool and even would need to have fruit fly like reaction times it's unlikely for humans but it's not impossible like it is for DC to make a fun superhero movie bullet slicing reaction times are plausible and we know that swords can't no keep it in keep it in I got it and we know that swords can slice bullets so to answer our last question does it even make sense to do so as a tactic see I got it slicing a bullet in half in midair with a sword is objectively awesome but it is also pointless if the halves of that slice bullet continue on to piss his squishy body it's as pointless as starting a new YouTube channel at a time when it makes the least sense business-wise anyway Deadpool signature move is to slice bullets in half that are coming straight at him now the problem is that when bullets are small they still carry quite a bit of momentum and so when they split they will follow the angle of the edge of this blade and split off and if that angle is too shallow then they will continue on and Pierce the blocker which is what we don't want what we do want is to find a sword angle that's plausible that will extend and push out these bullet fragments outside of where they would impact a blockers body and then you would be safe behind this katana shadow wow that's so cool sounding let's imagine that we were looking down on Deadpool slicing a bullet from above the bullet will come in from this direction impact the blade edge and then the fragments will continue along at these paths if we also assume that Deadpool Ryan Reynolds is maybe 50 centimeters wide what we are looking for is the blade angle at which the pieces will be far enough apart by the time they get to Deadpool that they do not impact him otherwise it's all pointless I honestly do not know why they let me have this in here it is pretty shy okay can you um can you get something real quick yeah no just like a band-aid or something yeah can you can you get it there's a lot okay just a second the easiest way to slice this problem is to split this triangle into two right triangles since we can estimate how far Deadpool holds out his swords from him remember sine cosine and tangent well if you know at least two sides of a right triangle you can use the inverse of one of these functions to get the angle that you are looking for in an AR case these two sides can be 25 centimeters which is half of the wideness distance that we are estimating and 61 centimeters because Ryan Reynolds and I are about the same height and I measured my outstretched arms if I was holding a sword at about two feet around 61 centimeters so then you can do the math if you do the trigonometry you get 22 degrees but remember this is only half of the angle that we're looking for because you split this into two right triangles so if you multiply this by two this sword angle that you would need if you are about Ryan rounds wideness and you held out a sword about Ryan Reynolds arm length away from you and you wanted to split a bullet in half and those halves miss you so you could make bullets slicing a viable tactic the sword edge would need to be about 44 degrees so to answer our final question are there any cutting implements in real life that have cutting edges in this range yes kitchen knives wood axes and even some household scissors have cutting edges just get that away from my hair you're so close oh could you pull off Deadpool signature move and slice a bullet in midair in half and have those pieces miss you making it a viable blocking method well if you had superhuman fruit fly like reaction times and you had a specially made katana that had a cutting angle of around 44 45 degrees which is unheard of for katanas but not for other cutting tools then yes an incoming bullet would split itself in half on your blade and those pieces if you're holding the blade out in front of you would miss you by the time that they got to you however because of the perfection that a move like this requires you'd probably end up taking a couple shots just like Deadpool does in Deadpool 2 although all in all it does make more sense than trying to do a superhero Avengers style team up movie after three poorly received films and one that was just okay because science taking shots all day all right just let me know when it's time to feel nice to me I'll be here right here [Music] yeah yeah almost okay yeah yeah take care yep yep I love you too and that's not just a theory thank you so much for watching Simon if you want more of me check out what's cool back on nerdist.com or go to project alpha at project alpha comm where you can sign up now for a free 30-day trial of premium Nerdist and geek and sundry content you can get this show two days earlier than everyone else also fall so follow because science here [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 1,839,920

Keywords: Nerdist, Fvid, Because Science, Kyle Hill, deadpool 2, ryan reynolds, cable, josh brolin, cutting bullets, physics, reflexes, brain, anatomy, physiology

Id: 7V6EACc7TEI

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018