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Spoilers ahead. SPOILERS!

Okay so I just watched Wanted with Russ and we couldn’t get over how you curve a bullet. This is like if David Beckham and the Shoot ‘Em Up guy had a baby. Together. With Peter Bloody Parker. I mean seriously. He just swings a pistol and bam! Of course Angelina Jolie wasn’t going to die in the oh-shit-I-did-it!-I-discover-I-have-badass-powers-AGAIN scene.

Now I love physics but hated it in secondary school (it was basically elementary math, but instead of “how many dollars does Tom have” you have “how fast is this generic object moving”) but I do know that forces are linear and you can reduce forces acting on an object to a single net force (right?) so without a constant force acting perpendicular / from whichever side of the bullet it will only travel straight in the direction that it was going when it left the barrel. Of course being excessively rationalistic I must assume that the mass of the bullet is perfectly evenly distributed, the surface is perfectly uniform, zero wind, negligible distance for the bullet to travel for gravity to matter when hitting a relatively large target, et cetera, et cetera. And then what? All I could come up with is let’s say there’s no gravity or wind resistance or whatever, and you fire a perfect bullet, it goes in a straight line. With gravity constantly acting on the bullet, it curves down. If a bullet was curving and somehow you turn gravity off (oh how I hate Counter-Strike) it would go in a straight line in whichever direction it was going at the moment you flipped the switch — there’s no such thing as a curved force. So the bullet will just travel in whatever direction it left the barrel at, if you were to swing a pistol while firing. The self-proclaimed experts who troll the Mythbusters forums seem to agree (edit: all 15098252 of the “zomg lol can a bullet curve like in this awesome movie i just saw” threads are slowly disappearing, and the Google cache of this particular one is missing the post I’m quoting below, but whatever. You can find more examples.), but they are still complete assholes. For example:

“Varus, I assume you got your wide knowledge of bullet behavior from cartoons and video games. I was only in police and security work for over 25 years, was on my department’s pistol team, am certified as a Range Master, Safety Officer and Basic Marksmanship Instructor, and am an amateur gunsmith. I tell you that it is physically impossible to curve a bullet as shown in that ridiculous movie”

This incredibly intelligent post is courtesy of lordfrogenhall, “Senior Member” of the Discovery.com forums with 11,659 posts over approximately 524 days (slightly less than 1.5 years) — that’s 22.25 posts per day, or somewhat less than once an hour. SO YOU ARE GOOD WITH GUNS. PRO TIP: DROP THE “only” IN THE SECOND SENTENCE. AND THEN STOP HANGING OUT ON THE FORUMS SO MUCH.

For serious, not everyone gets to study science to a high level even if they loved it to bits. If someone would pay me to crunch numbers and write some papers and theorise and analyse and computationalisationalise and be a total nerd? YES PLZ.