In Paul Hewitt's book, he poses this question: "If the forces that act on a bullet and the recoiling gun from which it is fired are equal in magnitude, why do the bullet and gun have very different accelerations?" Think about Newton's Second Law (F = ma) and answer his question.

They have different accelerations because of their masses. According to Newton's Second Law, an objects acceleration is inversely proportional to its mass. Therefore the object with the larger mass, in this case the gun, will have a smaller acceleration. In the same way, the less massive object, being the bullet, will have a higher acceleration.

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snehashish65 snehashish65 · Answer 2 · 2021-10-26T12:10:05+02:00

The bullet and recoiling gun has different acceleration due to their different masses.

As per the Newton's second law, "The force exerted on an object is proportional to the change in momentum". Which means,

[tex]F = \dfrac{dp}{dt}[/tex]

And momentum is,

p = mv

Clearly, the force is dependent on mass and acceleration. For which objects with different mass acceleration can have different value of acceleration or vice versa.

Due to this reason, the bullet and gun has same force but different mass has the different value of acceleration.

Thus, we can conclude that the bullet and recoiling gun has different acceleration due to different mass of each.

Learn more about Newton's second law here:

https://brainly.com/question/19860811?referrer=searchResults