hey there adam savage in my cave answering questions about my time on mythbusters and evan
curry wants to know when you did the gunfire into water meth this was uh the myth of from
like saving private ryan you see the bullets heading through the water and through soldiers
and the myth uh and yet frequently in action movies we see the hero out in the water at
night and the bad guys are shooting him he puts his head underwater and he seems to be totally
impervious to bullets that was the myth this evan curie curry says i noted that the high-powered
rifles actually penetrated less than the lower powered ones this is absolutely true
the nine millimeter handgun bullet went way way farther in the water than the 50 caliber bullet
um and that is because of what evan's next sentence is that was specifically because
the bigger and faster moving bullet expends more of its energy faster because it's bigger and it
does that for a specific reason a bullet has been built to this is a gruesome term of art
a bullet has been built to mechanically couple with us that is what they mean
i don't know if you've ever heard this but a bullet like to do its job effectively a
bullet it's going to enter you and then it's going to leave you and if
it's designed correctly it's going to leave you carrying as much of you with it as it can
and to do that they've designed the lead and the construction of a bullet uh to mechanically couple
with you so that means the second the instant the bullet hits your flesh it's been calibrated
to start to split apart when it meets the you and as it splits apart it starts damaging more and
more of you i know this is horrifyingly gruesome this is the science of bullets um thus the faster
it's going uh the more energy it's expending on that impact and the more damage it's going to do
um but you and i are like mostly water ugly bags of mostly water to quote my favorite star trek
line um we're like 70 water and so the bullet that's been made built to mechanically couple
with us also mechanically couples really well with water which makes total sense
but these are not the things that evan curry is concerned with he wants to know um did you
guys ever consider testing whether the shock wave from something like a 50 caliber rifle
might actually be deadly even if the bullet never reached the target that is a great question
it is a really great question and not one that
that we considered um one of the reasons we didn't consider this is like season
two i think of mythbusters uh maybe season three it's really early days so um we weren't yet
the scientist engineers that we became at that moment i think we were much more
sort of in the maelstrom of making the show and those kind of ancillary questions which are so
delightful to entertain and to potentially film narratives about um those weren't occurring to
us on every story that is a completely great question let me see if i can answer it um
i'm just trying to see if i have a point of view about whether or not it would happen i
i don't think that a 50 caliber 50 i don't think that the shock wave
from a 50 caliber bullet in water could harm you unless you're like right next to it so
shock wave propagation drops off fairly quickly and to give you an example um a grenade won't
kill you from more than like 10 or 12 feet away like all of that shockwave and shrapnel
is meant to do its job in a very small space a very localized space i might have my numbers
slightly wrong forgive me a military people if i'm off in that but the overall theme is right right
like a grenade in that corner of the room isn't going to kill someone in that corner of the room
and shockwave propagation in water is different than it is in air which we tested when we did the
story about the underwater explosion um people in the military used to be told uh if you if you're
if a depth charge is going to go off in the water you are better off um lying on your back in the
water rather than being immersed in the water because the shock wave will have less effect
on you but does that tell us anything about what a 50 caliber bullet shock wave would do
see i i i having detonated a lot of blasting caps in water and seeing that like we didn't even break
the box we built to hold that i just i have a hard time imagining but then the question is
is there a bullet powerful enough to kill you by its shockwave and water or is there a projectile
and that's another question i'm not exactly positive of i again i tend to think no i tend to
think that the that the drop off in the pressure wave would be really significant in the water
and so my feeling would be that in order to harm you from the shock wave literally have
to be traveling like right past you like like yeah like really close to you in which case
you're lucky to be alive um yeah we hadn't considered it and the reason was was because that
was early days thank you i i i wish i had more of an answer for you evan but it is a terrific
question and it's a completely valid one uh and one if we were still making the show absolutely
might make a revisit uh might make an excellent revisit because you could test lots of different
types of shock waves my sense is that your 50 cal bullet would have to be incredibly close
uh and that you might have to find an even bigger gun to find one that could harm you while
you were underwater but of course that's how we finish the episode right we'd go get the biggest
projectile shooting thing that anyone would give us access to in whatever
desert location we could find to fire it and some kiddie pool and buster would get
the um shockwave of his life yeah that's how that would have gone evan curry thank you so much for
such a provocative and delightful question tested patrons your questions are awesome keep submitting
them and i will keep answering them in this form thank you guys so much i will see you next time