The Meandering Bullet

an unusual spread of shots on a target, one occasionally hears a suggestion about the possible cause of a bullet’s unexpected flight behaviour that may be somewhat unconvincing or even a myth. To understand the causes of small deviations in a bullet’s flight and the possible reasons for this, one first has to start with the classical mechanics of Galileo. Four hundred years after his death, Galileo’s ballistic trajectory was demonstrated in a novel way by an astronaut hitting a golf ball on the moon. It was interesting because Galileo did not include the effect of atmospheric drag in his computation. The absence of an atmosphere on the moon enabled the ball to follow Galileo’s model and maintain a constant velocity throughout its flight. A second force, the acceleration of gravity, caused it to descend at a rate 16.6% less on the moon than