Sorcerer in training
"In Daniel Keys Moran's "A.I. War", the as yet unpublished sequel to "The Last Dancer" (available here), a bounty hunter shoots Trent with both barrels of a shotgun. Unfortunately for the bounty hunter, they happen to be on the surface of Ceres (one of the asteroids in our Asteroid Belt) at the time, which has an escape velocity of far less than the recoil of even one of the barrels of the gun. He is surprised to find himself flying off of Ceres in the direction of Earth at a few tens of meters per second."
"A somewhat questionable aversion occurs in the second Quatermass serial, when an astronaut fires a submachine gun on an asteroid, and the recoil knocks him off the low gravity surface and out into space."
There's a Hollywood Science problem with both of these: Namely, gunpowder has to burn to work. Unless the shells contain an oxidizing agent, the guns shouldn't fire at all!
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett
I'm not intending to insult anyone but I always find it humorous in tropes like this when a vast majority of the examples are subversions, aversions and inversions. For something that everyone knows they've seen before and seems so very common it's hard us to find actual examples of it in use in fiction.
You know it's common because it's lampshaded and averted so often in comedies and averted with such force in action and drama fiction that did their research.
This page is referred to by a link on the Rule of Cool page that says "Of scientific laws that this trope circumvents, the third law of motion is probably the most frequently revoked..."
I just wanted to suggest that "Law Of Inverse Recoil" is not the only place where the third law is ignored. Comic book superheroes who punch or throw things much heavier than themselves just about never show the inverse force. And in video games and comics a strike in the air typically sends the struck character reeling while the attacker's trajectory is very often unchanged or at least not accurately changed.
This of course is not part of the Main Law Of Inverse Recoil. I'm new here and I don't want to mess with other people's articles, but I thought a separate "Newton's third law of motion" page (and the violations of it in the media) would be very interesting.
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That might not be an issue...for example wolverine and superman likely have the requisite structure to absorb the force of a punch. For throwing objects it would depend on what they're standing on I'd imagine. When you throw something you use your base to channel the inverse force. If they're standing on firm ground you probably wouldn't see the any effects of the inverse force depending on the mass of the object thrown and the force at which it was thrown.
for a fight in the air where one person is sent reeling and the other continues on, I can see there being an issue as illustrated by this real-life example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwpRHrAh3pk
. 90% of the time it's justified by the ruleofcool :-)
Something missing from the first word of the description of this trope? Perhaps the word "rarely"?