I was thinking about how fire guns are very loud and how its worst in close environments (I had never shot a gun cuz im not american) and I remembered the Mirror room scene in John Wick Chapter 2.
I was thinking if by shooting once, many mirror could break because of the sounds of a gun alone. Has someone tried this or see it happen?
This is a good question and it certainly has me stumped.
ChatGPT says it’s possible and that it’s “not uncommon” for this to happen. It calls the phenomenon “acoustic or sonic glass breakage.”
Yet, Myth Busters disproved it in one of their episodes.
https://mythresults.com/curving-bullets
If I had to wager on it, I’d place my money on the Myth Busters having the correct answer and not ChatGPT, however.
Sound waves are pressure waves. Pressure waves are part of the mechanic of an explosion. Can an explosion break glass? Yes. Then the question becomes what variables to get it to happen. The pressure of a gunshot tends to disperse in all directions at the end of a barrel. However, a muzzle brake funnels that pressure. If a caliber is large enough to have enough pressure, if piece of glass is in the way of that funneled pressure, and is close enough that the energy hasn’t dissipated, then yes. The example would be a high caliber gun with the muzzle brake right next to a piece of glass, preferably a piece of glass that is not able to simply be tossed by the blast.
It is a very specific circumstance, but possible. It’s not going to be “Opera singer shatters glass with resonance” it’s going to be more like using a wave as a brute force hammer.
Unless you had a muzzle that specifically created resonanting waves at the glasses harmonic frequency, and a bunch of glass with the same resonance would all shatter even with a sound wave as small as a voice (much less a gunshot)