Eraser Analysis
Throughout the movie Eraser (which currently holds a 35% "rotten" rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes), the weapon of choice for the bad guys (and later in the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger) was a rail gun that the navy was developing. However, when watching the movie and the scenes in which the rail gun is used, it is blatantly obvious that the movie got the physics wrong regarding the usage of the rail gun.
When analyzing the usage of the rail gun, it is important to take into account the law of conservation of momentum. The law of conservation of momentum states in an external force of gravity or friction the total momentum before the collision is equal to teh total momentum after the collision. In other words, P(I) = P(F), where p is the momentum.
Rail guns do have a recoil in real life; however, in the movie, whenever the rail gun is fired off, whether it be by Arnold Schwarzenegger or somebody else, no body is affected by the recoil. Recoil is caused by sending high velocity mass out the end of the barrel of the gun. Throughout the movie, whenever the bullet was fired from the rail gun, it emitted a wave of light, indicating that the bullet fired from the gun was fired at or around the speed of light. When a bullet is fired from a gun at that speed, there is going to be a lot of recoil, and yet, the only person that went flying was the person that was hit by the bullet. If the physics were to actually be correct in the movie, then both the person firing the gun and the the person hit by the bullet would go flying, and would probably be able to fire the gun only once, due to the high speed at which the bullet traveled.
OVERALL GRADE: PGP:13
OVERALL GRADE: PGP:13
I think you meant "in the ABSENCE OF an external force." It's the absence of an external force that is key. I think you could have explained the concept of recoil, and how it relates to conservation of momentum, a bit better for your reader.
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