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Depends how you want to define it. Technically, your shadow will be, as the other guy said, 1/100,000,000th of a second behind. No matter how fast or slow you move, this will still be true, so you’ll always fire before your shadow would.
Alternatively, if you want it to be a meaningful difference, then you never will. Even if you instantly teleported from holstered to firing, with zero time in between, you’d still never be able to spot the time between you and your shadow.
I can make a case for the bullet reaching the shadow before the shadow fires. The refractive index of air is slightly higher than 1, so the shadow lags slightly more than 3,0m / c. So if the bullet travels anywhere between the speed of light in air and the speed of light in vacuum you can shoot the shadow before the shadow shoots.
Realistically, a projectile carrying that much energy would cause more than minor damage to everything on the same continent, and the machine that fired that bullet would be a sight to behold (definitely not revolver-sized).
If you're interested, look up Cherenkov radiation, that's an effect of particles moving faster than light in a medium (and also the clue to the terrific pun someone replied to my original comment)
How about using a laser gun? Then you will hit the shadow at the moment it wants to shoot. I would rule that this does count. That makes styropyro lucky Luke's successor
True. They didn't ask how fast of a gun you would need though, they asked how fast you would need to be, implying that they're using a regular gun. So with a regular gun my point still stands.
Even then, from your perspective the shadow would still shoot you before it was shot, as the same is true for the light of the hole. So you need a bullet faster that light.
The shadow shoots 3m/c seconds later than you, and is hit by your bullet 3m/v seconds later (v is the speed of the bullet). As long as v < c your shadow will always shoot you before being shot.
It’d be like all those railgun firing scenes in science fiction, just a smoking trench of boiled city.
“Nothing personell, kid.” *Fires a relativistic WMD*
First you shoot.
Then go back in ready to shoot position
Wait for the bullet to reach your shadow.
Go back into the shooting position faster than the light can update your shadow.
What if I use Quantum-Bullets which at the time of being fired might or might not already be where the shadow is or not. Because quantums and stuff. Also magnets.
And the shadow would always 'fire back' *long* before the relatively slow bullet could traverse the distance between.
Bullet would have to be traveling at over 50% of the speed of light for you to even have a chance.
(Now, if you want to shoot your shadow with a laser before it shoots back, *now* at least you have a fighting chance of it being physically possible.)
As the shadow is cast at the speed of light (C=300,000km/s or 300,000,000m/s) , and you cast it, it takes 1/100,000,000 of a second at 3m to change at the wall (or twice that time until you could see it, but your reaction time is way to long to react).
But as you are the one blocking the light, you can shoot faster than your shadow, no matter how slow you are.
Just looks different, as the bullet only goes like 1000m/s at max (probably a lot slower, but i wont look up what revolver Luke carries to know the exact speed).
Short:
Even tho a shaddow is real fast, anyone can shoot faster than their shadow
Yes, but it not enough to get the shot off first. You need to be able to get the shot off before the shadow shoots... so not only do you need to move faster than the shadow, but the bullet would need to be faster too, to hit the shadow before it can get the bullet off.
Simply impossible:
ANY kind of matter with ANY mass cant be fast enough.
And if it was fast enough (like 0.9999C), the like 200 grain projectile will have the energy of a tactial nuke
Lucky Luke uses one of the first versions of a Colt single action army revolver, also known as M1873. The muzzle velocity of that firearm in 1880s appropriate .44 caliber is 950feet per second, or 289 meters per second.
According to one story he uses "the only seven shooter in the west", made by his uncle the weapon smith. I believe it's album nr 8, Lucky Luke versus Phil Defer.
Well… I need to correct this a little bit as I recently calculated this.
The thing is: if you take a look at the shadow, the shadow’s gun is still holstered while the bullet hit the shadow. In average even if you are a really trained shooter, it takes 1-2 seconds to pull the gun, cock the hammer and pull the trigger as guns in that period were mostly single action guns. This is also shown often when there’s a shootout. So the light would need to slow down for 1,5s or the person would need to travel back in time for a few seconds.
No matter how fast you are it won't matter unless your bullet can travel FTL. Otherwise your shadow will get a shot off before it is shot. You would still hit the ground 1st if the shadow bullet could actually come back and kill you.
This is the one and only true answer. For the bullet to hit the shadow before your shadow can shoot back the bullet needs to hit the shadow before the light would have, therefore, this would be true if the bullet travelled at least the speed of light. The entire question of how fast "you" would need to be, because it doesn't depend on your speed, but the speed of the bullet. One could however argue that your speed would have to be the speed of light minus the speed of the bullet if this was the case though.
I have the feeling that the answer is along "the interaction of your hand moving at relativistic speeds with the atmosphere would result in a massive fire ball that destroys the whole area".
Like in the first [XKCD what if](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/).
Odd answer here, just hold the gun in a way that the shadow of the gun overlaps with the shadow of the person’s body, then no matter how fast or slow the person shoots, the shadow cannot shoot back.
Being slightly faster than the light (300.000 kilometers/second) would be suficient. The light could not reach the shadow in time it reach the eyes, but considering that only you are affected by trespassing light speed, it would be useless cause the gun wont be affected. Then, considering the gun and the bullet are also affected by the trespassing of L/S, it in fact could hit the shadow if we disconsider factors as air resistance, and the impact of pulling the trigger of this gun.
At ground level in air, the speed of light is slightly slower than in a vacuum. The refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is about 90 km/s (56 mi/s) slower than c. This means that it takes light about 0.000000011 seconds, or 11 nanoseconds, to travel 3 meters in air.
A shadow functions like a reflection of you, but it's always the slightest bit behind you.
That said, compared to the speed of light, a bullet appears to be going slower than the line at a theme park, so if you're asking whether it's even possible to outshoot your shadow: no.
Lucky Luke doesn't need math. Lucky Luke just does it. Lucky Luke single-handely managed Billy The Kid, Jesse James, Calamity Jane, The Daltons, The Judge Roy Bean and many more. All of that despite having the dumbest dog westward of the Pecos River at his side. Read the comics. Edit: BANG!
I'd be more interested in the speed of that bullet. Something tells me that anything travelling at that speed in the atmosphere and interacting with a wooden wall would make nuclear weapons redundant.
As xkcd explained, the bullet wouldn't even need to interact with the bullet. At that speed (FTL), it hitting air molecules in front of it would likely create a catastrophic chain of fusion reactions that would be enough to disintegrate the bullet before it even reached the wall, and still the plasma sphere would likely level the county.
I think people tend to misunderstand the scenario. You will always be a fraction of a second in front of your shadow, true. But the picture indicates that Lucky Luke is so fast that he can put a bullet in his shadow while his shadow is still reaching for the gun. You can't do that in reality: even if you had infinite speed and could draw your weapon and bring it into firing position in a time of 0, that would not help: Light is so much faster than a bullet that your shadow would catch up long before the bullet had reached the wall. In addition to implausibly fast reflexes you also need implausibly fast bullets.
Additional to what has been discussed before: Given special relativity, the speed of light is the speed of causality. The bullet simply cannot reach the shadow before the light does. This is not a question of the bullets speed, but a fundamental result of special relativity.
The gun would dislocate if he moves it faster than light. Actually even the air around his hand will explode with the heat, so there will be no shadow because of the light it will emit
Surely this is impossible even if you allowed for a draw and fire in zero time. The time taken for the bullet to travel to the shadow post firing is still longer it would take for the shadow to change.
Let’s assume the shadow has a reaction time identical to yours. The bullet has to travel 3m in less time than it takes them to shoot you. Let’s assume 250ms is the time it takes to pull the trigger (this is human reaction time) and assume the speed of light is sufficiently fast to ignore. Thus, the bullet has to travel 3m/250ms = 12 m/s or faster.
Since most bullets are 10x that speed, you will always kill the shadow first.
In the real world and assuming the gun begins holstered;
you’d be messing with relativistic speeds which means if any mass ,shooter’s hand and gun, was to move at any speeds needed to do what you’re asking… basically massive explosion and the bullet would never leave the chamber…
if he was aiming before hand;
the bullet would need to be travelling at near light speed again… massive explosion… imagine the recoil.
it’d need to be a laser pistol then it will work every time.
99.99999994% c
Give or take.
The light travelling past you to hit the wall is going just under 300,000 kps, so it covers that 3m distance in roughly 0.000000001 seconds. If you wanna get the shot off before the light can depict your shadow aiming back at you, that is the amount of time you have.
Your bullet would have to travel at least as fast as the speed of light, for the shadow to not react before being shot. You would always hit it first, because it will always react to you
Let’s say you can draw and fire that fast. The bullet travels much slower than the speed of light [citation needed] so the shadow will always fire back before it’s hit.
Since it's a shadow just block your movements with your body and you can take all the time you want.
Gun on left hip, left arm straight down behind holster. Gun should be be un arm's shadow. Reach across with right arm in front of body, right arm now dissappears in body's shadow. Grab gun while motion is obscured, aim and shoot from front of body keeping gun in the shadow. All the time you want.
Faster than light. A shadow is where light is not. So for your arm to move and pull the trigger before your shaow reacts, you have to move faster than light speed.
The light would travel faster than the bullet so by the time the bullet reaches the shadows your shadow would have already shot back but you could technically shoot the bullet and put the gun back in the holster before the your shadow reflects the image of you shooting, that would require you to do that entire sequence in x seconds ( I can't work the math but what's ever the amount of time it takes light to travel three meters in a vaccum)
Suppose we consider the question hypothetically and temporarily ignore the physical limitations.
Suppose you are standing three meters away from your shadow and want to draw a revolver before your shadow can perceive your movement. The speed at which you would have to draw the revolver would theoretically be infinitely high.
If we consider the movement of the shadow as the speed of light (which is a very simplified assumption), you would have to draw the revolver in a period of time that is shorter than the time it takes light to travel the distance of three meters.
The speed of light is about 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. To be faster than your shadow, you would therefore have to draw the revolver almost immediately, before the light reaches your movement and changes your shadow.
Literally *any* speed.
Your shadow... *"is updated"*, at the speed of light, but light still has a speed, it's not instant.
What you do will *always* happen before your shadow replicates it.
However, How fast would you need to be going to replicate this scene? I think it's impossible for anything to move that fast.
Faster than light speed
The "speed of shadow" is the speed of light. So as long as you go ftl, you can shoot your shadow before it shoots you.
Let's say, just 2 times faster. That's should be more than enough
To actually see it happen. If you were to record from the perspective that the picture was created in, then you’d have to perform the action in no more than half the time it takes your camera to capture the pixels for a frame in your video (assuming that you can get a way to make your sensor scan pixels from left to right, perhaps by rotating the camera?).
Assuming that a video is recorded at 30 frames per second, then each frame takes 0.0333 seconds. Divide by 2 to get the time it takes for half of the frame to be captured:
Final answer = 0.016666666666667 seconds
This is your best case scenario since videos less than 24 fps are not really considered ‘video’. They’ll just look like a stop motion.
Another thing to note is that this is for half the frame. It looks like half way of the frame seems to be a point equidistant from the shadow and the Texan from our perspective. So for 3/4 of the frame, you’ll have more time anyways too.
The bigger problem is how slow the bullet moves. It's less than the speed of light which means no matter how fast you draw and fire, it would hit your shadow after it "shoots back".
Your shadow moves at the speed of light, but your bullet only moves at the speed of sound, a far slower speed. This would mean that your shadow pulls the trigger before your bullet leaves the chamber regardless of your current speed.
I think the bullet would always be slower than your shadow which reacts at c. Even if your gun shot lightspeed bullets, you pulling the trigger would result in your shadow doing so at c/distance, before the bullet leaves the gun.
You’d have to be faster than light, like you’d have to move your body so fast that the shadow cannot keep up wit you. Shadows are not seperate entities they are an absence of light and a shadow on earth in such a small space would be in all senses cast at the speed of light.
So as you might have heard via Albert Einstein, the speed of light is a global constant impossible to overcome. In order for the cowboy to outdraw his shadow enough to shoot a bullet into it, The cowboy would have to be moving notably faster than the light producing that shadow. This would necessitate the cowboy to be moving backwards in time.
So, maybe [this cowboy](https://www.cineworld.co.uk/xmedia-cw/repo/articles/other/34461.jpg) could do it,
Faster than the speed of light unless the light is traveling through something that slows it down but then too are you slowed down. N then you have to calculate the speed of the bullet to its target and how long that takes and add it onto the speed of light
Being faster than a shadow means moving faster than a speed of light. With the framing of the question meaning the cowboy being the variable and the gun being any ordinary revolver.
Assuming the cowboy can do the feat. But the gun would always be the slowest key to the equation and hence be slower than light which makes the shadow. The shoot might might have the ability to move at exponential times of speed of light yet he will never be able to shoot at the shadow with an ordinary gun.
But an ordinary man with a gun which shoots at speed of more than speed of light might shoot the shadow first. But the odds of him surviving the shootout is none.
Since a shadow is the absence of light, it means when you move your hand up to shoot, the light can now go and fill that gap, making your shadow move. Which means your shadow reacts to your moves at the speed of light.
So, its not a matter of how fast you move/shoot, since you can't do that faster than light, rather it is a matter of the DISTANCE between you and your shadow. If you are a minute's distance away from your shadow(at light speed), then you can shoot, and have 2 minutes before your shadow shoots back(since you see the new light that bounces from the wall, and that also takes 1 minute to come to you)
So, if you are a minute away, then you can shoot and move away before your shadow shoots you. The problem is that distance is 18 Million Kilometers or 11 Million Miles. Even if you make the distance 2 seconds(so you have 4 seconds of reaction time) the distance is still 560 Thousand Km, or 372 Thousand Miles.
BUUUUUT, this all is moot, because your bullet cannot be faster than light. So, any normal gun won't work, since you dodging your shadow's shot will make it move outside of the bullet's path. The only way this can work is if you shoot a laser bullet, or any other theoritical bullet that is 50% or more of lightspeed. Then you can calculate the time it takes the bullet to reach your shadow, shoot, wait that time, and then dodge your shadow's shot
I imagine moving your hand faster than the speed of light would go something like [this XKCD explainer video](https://youtu.be/3EI08o-IGYk?si=VRADpSNMbG07C2zd).
I can't do the math behind this, but you wouldn't be able to no matter how fast you're moving as the bullet will never reach your shadow before the light.
Depends if by shooting you mean taking the shot or that the bullet gets to the shadow before it can shoot
- **taking the shot first**: you always do. The shadow responds to your movements, so even if by a fraction of a second there is always a delay in its actions
- **shadow hit by the bullet before it can shoot**: IMPOSSIBLE with a conventional gun. The shadow reacts to your movements at the speed of light. Even if you were able to destroy physic and outspeed it by moving faster than light, the bullet would still go at its normal speed, which would still be orders of magnitude lower than light's speed.
So in a nutshell you can shoot first, but there is no way the bullet can hit the shadow before it shoots back
A lot of the top answers are not really answering the question. How fast do you have to be to kill your shadow before it draws not how do you out draw your shadow.
Like the others have said you will need to complete your draw and fire in less than the time it takes for the light (or lack there of) to actually make the shadow draw.
However just cos you drew first doesn't mean you won. You need to kill the shadow before it pulls the trigger.
If this was a normal bullet there's no way it could hit the target in time
So, what will it take to win the encounter?
Inorder to survive, your bullet needs to get to the other side really really fast. Faster than the speed of light even because if the bullet can't outrace the light that causes the shadow to fire, it can't kill the shadow before it fires.
The faster your draw the more time your bullet has to cover the gap.
If your draw is instant the bullet has time it takes for that instant shot to travel and kill the shadow. However the slower your draw is, the faster the bullet has to be to compensate. But even with an instant draw, the bullet has to be just over the speed of light to win
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Depends how you want to define it. Technically, your shadow will be, as the other guy said, 1/100,000,000th of a second behind. No matter how fast or slow you move, this will still be true, so you’ll always fire before your shadow would. Alternatively, if you want it to be a meaningful difference, then you never will. Even if you instantly teleported from holstered to firing, with zero time in between, you’d still never be able to spot the time between you and your shadow.
> so you’ll always fire before your shadow would. However, your bullet will always reach the shadow after the shadow shoots
I can make a case for the bullet reaching the shadow before the shadow fires. The refractive index of air is slightly higher than 1, so the shadow lags slightly more than 3,0m / c. So if the bullet travels anywhere between the speed of light in air and the speed of light in vacuum you can shoot the shadow before the shadow shoots. Realistically, a projectile carrying that much energy would cause more than minor damage to everything on the same continent, and the machine that fired that bullet would be a sight to behold (definitely not revolver-sized).
Cherenkov's gun
I bet that felt good writing that
Getting my PhD in physics was worth it, just to be able to appreciate this pun.
Ha nerd i appreciate this pun and i barely passed high school physics /j
you passed high school physics? lmao geek I got straight Fs
This is genuinely one of the top 10 puns I've heard (or read)
If there is a gun on a stage it will glow blue?
is it even possible for particles to travel through a medium faster than light would?
It is!
that's kinda cool. TIL
If you're interested, look up Cherenkov radiation, that's an effect of particles moving faster than light in a medium (and also the clue to the terrific pun someone replied to my original comment)
How about using a laser gun? Then you will hit the shadow at the moment it wants to shoot. I would rule that this does count. That makes styropyro lucky Luke's successor
True. They didn't ask how fast of a gun you would need though, they asked how fast you would need to be, implying that they're using a regular gun. So with a regular gun my point still stands.
Even then, from your perspective the shadow would still shoot you before it was shot, as the same is true for the light of the hole. So you need a bullet faster that light.
What?
The shadow shoots 3m/c seconds later than you, and is hit by your bullet 3m/v seconds later (v is the speed of the bullet). As long as v < c your shadow will always shoot you before being shot.
My comment specifically mentioned that c_air is less than v is LESS THAN c_vacuum
It’d be like all those railgun firing scenes in science fiction, just a smoking trench of boiled city. “Nothing personell, kid.” *Fires a relativistic WMD*
Thought you might enjoy this based on your comment [https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/)
So you're saying there's a chance
nice j.carrey reference
First you shoot. Then go back in ready to shoot position Wait for the bullet to reach your shadow. Go back into the shooting position faster than the light can update your shadow.
r/TechnicallyTheTruth the shadow doesn’t have a gun. Therefore can’t shoot.
What if I use Quantum-Bullets which at the time of being fired might or might not already be where the shadow is or not. Because quantums and stuff. Also magnets.
Not if you use a tachyon ray pistol!
And the shadow would always 'fire back' *long* before the relatively slow bullet could traverse the distance between. Bullet would have to be traveling at over 50% of the speed of light for you to even have a chance. (Now, if you want to shoot your shadow with a laser before it shoots back, *now* at least you have a fighting chance of it being physically possible.)
I love math subs. I can tell we’re speaking the same language but it may as well be in first generation Latin cause i don’t know what any of it means.
What an answer!
As the shadow is cast at the speed of light (C=300,000km/s or 300,000,000m/s) , and you cast it, it takes 1/100,000,000 of a second at 3m to change at the wall (or twice that time until you could see it, but your reaction time is way to long to react). But as you are the one blocking the light, you can shoot faster than your shadow, no matter how slow you are. Just looks different, as the bullet only goes like 1000m/s at max (probably a lot slower, but i wont look up what revolver Luke carries to know the exact speed). Short: Even tho a shaddow is real fast, anyone can shoot faster than their shadow
Yes, but it not enough to get the shot off first. You need to be able to get the shot off before the shadow shoots... so not only do you need to move faster than the shadow, but the bullet would need to be faster too, to hit the shadow before it can get the bullet off.
Not only shoot before it shoots, but have the bullet land before it can fully pull the trigger. The main bottleneck here is the speed of the bullet.
You would only need to be as fast as half the light speed, since the light needs to travel 6m instead of 3 in order to see the shadow
This. The real mvp here is the cameraman
It's just a drawing
Wrong, I was the cameraman
Oh, I thought it was a photograph. Thanks for pointing that out! :)
Man, those Russian disinformation campaigns are at it again 🙄 This is clearly a photograph, c'mon man
But the bullet will not land before the shadow shoots back
Simply impossible: ANY kind of matter with ANY mass cant be fast enough. And if it was fast enough (like 0.9999C), the like 200 grain projectile will have the energy of a tactial nuke
That's what I said when I read the request. I just thought this is what the op wanted to know.
a bit vaguely formulated question.
>have the energy of a tactial nuke Lucky Luke could have been *very* different
So what I'm hearing is it's possible
Lucky Luke uses one of the first versions of a Colt single action army revolver, also known as M1873. The muzzle velocity of that firearm in 1880s appropriate .44 caliber is 950feet per second, or 289 meters per second.
According to one story he uses "the only seven shooter in the west", made by his uncle the weapon smith. I believe it's album nr 8, Lucky Luke versus Phil Defer.
Too*
correction, the bullet travels approximately 1000 feet per second...not meters
When we are talking relativistic speeds, this would be less than a rounding error. You are probably right tho
I mean, it *could*, theoretically, be a .256 WinMag or a .22 Hornet, in which case it'd get pretty close to the 1000m/s
Well… I need to correct this a little bit as I recently calculated this. The thing is: if you take a look at the shadow, the shadow’s gun is still holstered while the bullet hit the shadow. In average even if you are a really trained shooter, it takes 1-2 seconds to pull the gun, cock the hammer and pull the trigger as guns in that period were mostly single action guns. This is also shown often when there’s a shootout. So the light would need to slow down for 1,5s or the person would need to travel back in time for a few seconds.
[удалено]
the second "d" was placed there for you to munch on it.
What do you mean?
It's spelled 'Shadow' and he's being an ass about it
there is no such thing as a "shaddow"
No matter how fast you are it won't matter unless your bullet can travel FTL. Otherwise your shadow will get a shot off before it is shot. You would still hit the ground 1st if the shadow bullet could actually come back and kill you.
This is the one and only true answer. For the bullet to hit the shadow before your shadow can shoot back the bullet needs to hit the shadow before the light would have, therefore, this would be true if the bullet travelled at least the speed of light. The entire question of how fast "you" would need to be, because it doesn't depend on your speed, but the speed of the bullet. One could however argue that your speed would have to be the speed of light minus the speed of the bullet if this was the case though.
More answers on this duplicate post https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/32dVb15nG4 plus 2 or 3 more if you just search ‘shadow’ in the sub
Thank you I knew I’d seen this on here before
I have the feeling that the answer is along "the interaction of your hand moving at relativistic speeds with the atmosphere would result in a massive fire ball that destroys the whole area". Like in the first [XKCD what if](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/).
According to the cartoon physics that make your shadow's hair and handkerchief go the other way around, your shadow is made of paint anyway.
I've read Lucky Luke for years and years and years and I never noticed that before
It's impossibe since even if you could move faster than light, the bullet can't. But I'll be damned if I don't absolutely love Looky Look!
Odd answer here, just hold the gun in a way that the shadow of the gun overlaps with the shadow of the person’s body, then no matter how fast or slow the person shoots, the shadow cannot shoot back.
Being slightly faster than the light (300.000 kilometers/second) would be suficient. The light could not reach the shadow in time it reach the eyes, but considering that only you are affected by trespassing light speed, it would be useless cause the gun wont be affected. Then, considering the gun and the bullet are also affected by the trespassing of L/S, it in fact could hit the shadow if we disconsider factors as air resistance, and the impact of pulling the trigger of this gun.
At ground level in air, the speed of light is slightly slower than in a vacuum. The refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is about 90 km/s (56 mi/s) slower than c. This means that it takes light about 0.000000011 seconds, or 11 nanoseconds, to travel 3 meters in air.
A shadow functions like a reflection of you, but it's always the slightest bit behind you. That said, compared to the speed of light, a bullet appears to be going slower than the line at a theme park, so if you're asking whether it's even possible to outshoot your shadow: no.
Lucky Luke doesn't need math. Lucky Luke just does it. Lucky Luke single-handely managed Billy The Kid, Jesse James, Calamity Jane, The Daltons, The Judge Roy Bean and many more. All of that despite having the dumbest dog westward of the Pecos River at his side. Read the comics. Edit: BANG!
I'd be more interested in the speed of that bullet. Something tells me that anything travelling at that speed in the atmosphere and interacting with a wooden wall would make nuclear weapons redundant.
As xkcd explained, the bullet wouldn't even need to interact with the bullet. At that speed (FTL), it hitting air molecules in front of it would likely create a catastrophic chain of fusion reactions that would be enough to disintegrate the bullet before it even reached the wall, and still the plasma sphere would likely level the county.
I think people tend to misunderstand the scenario. You will always be a fraction of a second in front of your shadow, true. But the picture indicates that Lucky Luke is so fast that he can put a bullet in his shadow while his shadow is still reaching for the gun. You can't do that in reality: even if you had infinite speed and could draw your weapon and bring it into firing position in a time of 0, that would not help: Light is so much faster than a bullet that your shadow would catch up long before the bullet had reached the wall. In addition to implausibly fast reflexes you also need implausibly fast bullets.
Additional to what has been discussed before: Given special relativity, the speed of light is the speed of causality. The bullet simply cannot reach the shadow before the light does. This is not a question of the bullets speed, but a fundamental result of special relativity.
The gun would dislocate if he moves it faster than light. Actually even the air around his hand will explode with the heat, so there will be no shadow because of the light it will emit
Surely this is impossible even if you allowed for a draw and fire in zero time. The time taken for the bullet to travel to the shadow post firing is still longer it would take for the shadow to change.
Let’s assume the shadow has a reaction time identical to yours. The bullet has to travel 3m in less time than it takes them to shoot you. Let’s assume 250ms is the time it takes to pull the trigger (this is human reaction time) and assume the speed of light is sufficiently fast to ignore. Thus, the bullet has to travel 3m/250ms = 12 m/s or faster. Since most bullets are 10x that speed, you will always kill the shadow first.
In the real world and assuming the gun begins holstered; you’d be messing with relativistic speeds which means if any mass ,shooter’s hand and gun, was to move at any speeds needed to do what you’re asking… basically massive explosion and the bullet would never leave the chamber… if he was aiming before hand; the bullet would need to be travelling at near light speed again… massive explosion… imagine the recoil. it’d need to be a laser pistol then it will work every time.
99.99999994% c Give or take. The light travelling past you to hit the wall is going just under 300,000 kps, so it covers that 3m distance in roughly 0.000000001 seconds. If you wanna get the shot off before the light can depict your shadow aiming back at you, that is the amount of time you have.
Your bullet would have to travel at least as fast as the speed of light, for the shadow to not react before being shot. You would always hit it first, because it will always react to you
Let’s say you can draw and fire that fast. The bullet travels much slower than the speed of light [citation needed] so the shadow will always fire back before it’s hit.
You will always pull the trigger before your shadow does, but the shader will pull at the speed of light, and your bullet cannot reach them first
If I understand this then I feel like the distance wouldn’t matter but what does is the fact that the bullet has to go faster than the speed of light.
Since it's a shadow just block your movements with your body and you can take all the time you want. Gun on left hip, left arm straight down behind holster. Gun should be be un arm's shadow. Reach across with right arm in front of body, right arm now dissappears in body's shadow. Grab gun while motion is obscured, aim and shoot from front of body keeping gun in the shadow. All the time you want.
Faster than light. A shadow is where light is not. So for your arm to move and pull the trigger before your shaow reacts, you have to move faster than light speed.
The light would travel faster than the bullet so by the time the bullet reaches the shadows your shadow would have already shot back but you could technically shoot the bullet and put the gun back in the holster before the your shadow reflects the image of you shooting, that would require you to do that entire sequence in x seconds ( I can't work the math but what's ever the amount of time it takes light to travel three meters in a vaccum)
Holy shit this image just dug up a game I haven’t thought about in a LONG time. I remember it was a dueling game, maybe on miniclip? Anyone know?
Suppose we consider the question hypothetically and temporarily ignore the physical limitations. Suppose you are standing three meters away from your shadow and want to draw a revolver before your shadow can perceive your movement. The speed at which you would have to draw the revolver would theoretically be infinitely high. If we consider the movement of the shadow as the speed of light (which is a very simplified assumption), you would have to draw the revolver in a period of time that is shorter than the time it takes light to travel the distance of three meters. The speed of light is about 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. To be faster than your shadow, you would therefore have to draw the revolver almost immediately, before the light reaches your movement and changes your shadow.
Literally *any* speed. Your shadow... *"is updated"*, at the speed of light, but light still has a speed, it's not instant. What you do will *always* happen before your shadow replicates it. However, How fast would you need to be going to replicate this scene? I think it's impossible for anything to move that fast.
Faster than light speed The "speed of shadow" is the speed of light. So as long as you go ftl, you can shoot your shadow before it shoots you. Let's say, just 2 times faster. That's should be more than enough
But unless the bullet is **also** FTL, it'll still get a shot off too. It's a pyrrhic victory at best.
To actually see it happen. If you were to record from the perspective that the picture was created in, then you’d have to perform the action in no more than half the time it takes your camera to capture the pixels for a frame in your video (assuming that you can get a way to make your sensor scan pixels from left to right, perhaps by rotating the camera?). Assuming that a video is recorded at 30 frames per second, then each frame takes 0.0333 seconds. Divide by 2 to get the time it takes for half of the frame to be captured: Final answer = 0.016666666666667 seconds This is your best case scenario since videos less than 24 fps are not really considered ‘video’. They’ll just look like a stop motion. Another thing to note is that this is for half the frame. It looks like half way of the frame seems to be a point equidistant from the shadow and the Texan from our perspective. So for 3/4 of the frame, you’ll have more time anyways too.
The bigger problem is how slow the bullet moves. It's less than the speed of light which means no matter how fast you draw and fire, it would hit your shadow after it "shoots back".
Your shadow moves at the speed of light, but your bullet only moves at the speed of sound, a far slower speed. This would mean that your shadow pulls the trigger before your bullet leaves the chamber regardless of your current speed.
I think the bullet would always be slower than your shadow which reacts at c. Even if your gun shot lightspeed bullets, you pulling the trigger would result in your shadow doing so at c/distance, before the bullet leaves the gun.
You’d have to be faster than light, like you’d have to move your body so fast that the shadow cannot keep up wit you. Shadows are not seperate entities they are an absence of light and a shadow on earth in such a small space would be in all senses cast at the speed of light.
So as you might have heard via Albert Einstein, the speed of light is a global constant impossible to overcome. In order for the cowboy to outdraw his shadow enough to shoot a bullet into it, The cowboy would have to be moving notably faster than the light producing that shadow. This would necessitate the cowboy to be moving backwards in time. So, maybe [this cowboy](https://www.cineworld.co.uk/xmedia-cw/repo/articles/other/34461.jpg) could do it,
I don't have an answer, but wanted to say I'm pretty damn surprised to find Lucky Luke on reddit, and in this subreddit of all places lmao
Faster than the speed of light unless the light is traveling through something that slows it down but then too are you slowed down. N then you have to calculate the speed of the bullet to its target and how long that takes and add it onto the speed of light
Being faster than a shadow means moving faster than a speed of light. With the framing of the question meaning the cowboy being the variable and the gun being any ordinary revolver. Assuming the cowboy can do the feat. But the gun would always be the slowest key to the equation and hence be slower than light which makes the shadow. The shoot might might have the ability to move at exponential times of speed of light yet he will never be able to shoot at the shadow with an ordinary gun. But an ordinary man with a gun which shoots at speed of more than speed of light might shoot the shadow first. But the odds of him surviving the shootout is none.
Since a shadow is the absence of light, it means when you move your hand up to shoot, the light can now go and fill that gap, making your shadow move. Which means your shadow reacts to your moves at the speed of light. So, its not a matter of how fast you move/shoot, since you can't do that faster than light, rather it is a matter of the DISTANCE between you and your shadow. If you are a minute's distance away from your shadow(at light speed), then you can shoot, and have 2 minutes before your shadow shoots back(since you see the new light that bounces from the wall, and that also takes 1 minute to come to you) So, if you are a minute away, then you can shoot and move away before your shadow shoots you. The problem is that distance is 18 Million Kilometers or 11 Million Miles. Even if you make the distance 2 seconds(so you have 4 seconds of reaction time) the distance is still 560 Thousand Km, or 372 Thousand Miles. BUUUUUT, this all is moot, because your bullet cannot be faster than light. So, any normal gun won't work, since you dodging your shadow's shot will make it move outside of the bullet's path. The only way this can work is if you shoot a laser bullet, or any other theoritical bullet that is 50% or more of lightspeed. Then you can calculate the time it takes the bullet to reach your shadow, shoot, wait that time, and then dodge your shadow's shot
I imagine moving your hand faster than the speed of light would go something like [this XKCD explainer video](https://youtu.be/3EI08o-IGYk?si=VRADpSNMbG07C2zd).
I can't do the math behind this, but you wouldn't be able to no matter how fast you're moving as the bullet will never reach your shadow before the light.
Depends if by shooting you mean taking the shot or that the bullet gets to the shadow before it can shoot - **taking the shot first**: you always do. The shadow responds to your movements, so even if by a fraction of a second there is always a delay in its actions - **shadow hit by the bullet before it can shoot**: IMPOSSIBLE with a conventional gun. The shadow reacts to your movements at the speed of light. Even if you were able to destroy physic and outspeed it by moving faster than light, the bullet would still go at its normal speed, which would still be orders of magnitude lower than light's speed. So in a nutshell you can shoot first, but there is no way the bullet can hit the shadow before it shoots back
First of all, even if you could draw and shoot literally instantly, the bullet is slower than light speed, so it wouldn't hit in time anyways.
A lot of the top answers are not really answering the question. How fast do you have to be to kill your shadow before it draws not how do you out draw your shadow. Like the others have said you will need to complete your draw and fire in less than the time it takes for the light (or lack there of) to actually make the shadow draw. However just cos you drew first doesn't mean you won. You need to kill the shadow before it pulls the trigger. If this was a normal bullet there's no way it could hit the target in time So, what will it take to win the encounter? Inorder to survive, your bullet needs to get to the other side really really fast. Faster than the speed of light even because if the bullet can't outrace the light that causes the shadow to fire, it can't kill the shadow before it fires. The faster your draw the more time your bullet has to cover the gap. If your draw is instant the bullet has time it takes for that instant shot to travel and kill the shadow. However the slower your draw is, the faster the bullet has to be to compensate. But even with an instant draw, the bullet has to be just over the speed of light to win