No. If he drops the bullet, the bullet is going at 1000mph. When he’s holding the bullet it is going at 1000mph in his hand, right? So if he drops it, why is it suddenly going to slow down 1000mph so that he moves away from it at 1000mph?
Furthermore, why would a gun which fires a bullet at 1000mph relative to the gun suddenly going to fire it at 2000mph relative to the gun just because the guy firing it is moving?
I’d love a gun like that!
Only if it’s on a treadmill.
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Oh, come on, someone was going to post that.
I wanted to. First thing I thought of when I read the OP. 
It’ll probably always pop in my head with every “what if” now.
True enough. Before firing, the bullet is moving 1000 mph (say, East) relative to the track. The act of firing cancels all of this Eastward momentum (by introducing a 1000 mph Westward impetus), giving the bullet of velocity of 0mph relative to the track, and presumably to the asbestos-mitted bystander waiting to catch some hot lead.
And if he just dropped the bullet, it wouldn’t appear to zoom away at 1000mph unless it fell to the track and stopped while the train continued on its way (and this would require reaching over the back end of the train; dropping the bullet with your hand at your side simply means it’ll fall to at your feet). For the same reason, if you toss a softball straight up while on a moving train, it falls back into your hand rather than instantly zooms to the back of the train, smashing through the window and being left behind faster than a Hindu in a Tim LaHaye novel.
If he drops the bullet of the back of the train, then (ignoring air resistance and turbulence) the bullet will hit the ground at a tiny bit more than 1,000 mph – having been accelerated slightly due to gravity. It’s just the same as if you jump out of a train: you hit the ground at the speed the train is travelling, unless you compensate for the speed by jumping backwards. So you can jump off a train traveling at 10 mph fairly easily, but don’t try to jump off a train at 100 mph unless you are going to land on something soft, and are prepared to roll a fair way.
Oh, right, right. I always sucked at reference frames… :smack:
(They really shouldn’t let me be an engineer.)
Actually, the bullet would be hot, sort of. The extreme rotation speed would create a huge amount of friction if you grabbed it.
Note also that with the large speeds being considered, even small errors in angle will result in a sizeable vertical component to velocity. If we are using the 1000mph case, a half degree error in angle will give the thing an initial velocity of about 9mph either up or down.
It’s easier to imagine if you think of a regular speed train and the guy tossing a baseball out. The faster the train goes, the less far the toss is from the viewer, until after the train picks up speed you can no longer toss and reach the viewer.
Wait-a-minute: QED bullets aren’t hot? You’re explanations sounds very plausible, and I would have bought it off the bat had I not read someplace-somewhere that the victims of GSW’s can describe a burning sensation post-impact. OR is that burning sensation due to the rotational inertia of the bullet searing the flesh when slicing through the body?
The hot gasses propelling the bullet and the friction of the barrel only have a very short time to act, so only the surface of the bullet gets very hot before it exits the barrel. Most of the mass of the bullet will still be at ambient temperature, more or less. Redistribution of the surface heat through conduction, as well as the air rushing over it will serve to cool the surface rapidly. I suspect that within a barrel length or so from the gun, the bullet will have cooled almost to its initial temp.
I can’t directly address the reports of GSW victims, not having ever been shot myself, but I imagine that having a chunk of lead punch through your body at 1000 fps while spinning like a dentist’s drill would feel like burning regardless of the actual temperature of the slug.
Here’s a link to a site that describes measuring the temperature of a 5.56mm rifle bullet in flight using infrared imaging. They came up with a value of 513 degrees F at 1 meter from the muzzle.
Think of objects in earth orbit. If the shuttle is going 18,000 MPH, everything inside of it is also going at the same speed. When an astronaut goes outside the ship to perform a task, he is still going at the same speed as the shuttle. Any movement he makes is relative to that relationship.
I was shocked to see a response by Q.E.D. until I saw the 2006 date.
The Bullet Train thing?
Well, you seem the villain was trying to get revenge on all these gangsters, so he set them up to kill each other.
What?
I know this is a zombie but I wanted to point out that Mythbusters did in fact demonstrate this. At much slower velocities of course. They fired balls off the back of a pickup truck bed at exactly the forward speed of the truck and were able to match them perfectly. The camera on the ground showed that when fired the ball just hung there and dropped straight down. To the camera mounted on the truck bed it appeared the ball shot away at 50 mph. One of the coolest experiments they did.
IMO an even more interesting situation is when a pebble is stuck in a tire tread.
Let’s say a car has a speed of 60 MPH and a pebble is stuck in a tire tread. When the pebble is at the 12:00 position (highest point), the pebble has a speed of 120 MPH relative to the road. When the pebble is at the 6:00 position (lowest point), the pebble has a speed of 0 MPH relative to the road. When the pebble returns to the 12:00 position, the pebble has a speed of 120 MPH relative to the road. And so on.
This must be why when I am driving at the speed of light and I turn my headlights on I can’t see a thing.