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Comic Book Physics
hij writes "NANDO net has an article about a physics professor at the University of Minnesota is offering a class in
Comic Book Physics. He looks into such things as the amount of calories that the Flash burns and the tension in spider-mans web."
CUBICLE MAN: Able to ignore work at lightspeed
Thor can "fly" ballistically by throwing his hammer and then catching the leather thong on the end a small fraction of a second later. Class discussion: would this really work? Why or why not? If it did work and Thor routinely accellerates several hundred miles per hour in a fraction of a second, we may acribe the fact that his arm is not ripped from its socket to his godly constitution, but how does his helmet stay on his head? (We've seen it knocked off in fights, so we know it has no natural cranially adhesive properties.)
How much energy must his hammer expend in order to generate a lightning flash? What are the potential sources for this energy?
When Thor (or anyone else who is "worthy") holds his hammer, its weight appears to be negligible. For anyone else, the weight is infinite. (We know the mass remains constant. It does not become infinite because of the lack of the normal space-bending effects associated with an infinite mass, and it does not fall to zero because Thor can impart a great deal of momentum with it.) Use Schroedinger's equation to determine a probablity function describing the hammer's weight when nobody is holding it.
I could go on, but I don't want to be more geeky than absolutely necessary.
And the brethren went away edified.
One of the biggest issues I think our society faces is a lack of basic science. I don't mean a knowledge of facts. We've got plenty of that. Ignorance of the methods of science -- how to do science -- makes us uncritical acceptors of media manipulation.
Anyone who can get someone to learn and do basic physics deserves respect and thanks. I had a teacher like this. He didn't use something so consistently systematic as comic book physics, but we did have a lot of fun doing calulations of pointlessly impossible experiments. I remember going over the calculations for the conversion of velocity to heat in a collision by calculating how fast you would have to throw a tomato at a brick wall to have it fully cooked on impact (never mind that you wouldn't be able to scrape enough of the result together to make a milliliter).
I remember calculating if you spontaneously destructed the sun how much oatmeal you could cook (in cups).
We also did some real physics, like designing a balsa wood bridge (everone got the same materials with no rules on how you could use the materials) to take the greatest load. We did our vector math, we did our elastic collisions, we did our statics. We also did a lot of "frictionless monkey" problems.
I loved physics and even though I ended up a programmer with a history major, I took away a love for and a basic knowledge of science.
Teachers like this are the greatest resource in the world.
As a bonus, the students may come away looking at stuff in real life and thinking about the forces involved whatever-it-is. Many people put their learning in compartments: they think about physics when they do physics problems, they think about math when they do math problems, and so on.
One challenge facing all teachers is to get them to see the physics, and math, and chemistry, all around them all the time. Physics isn't just in a physics problem: it's in everything that moves.
If we pretend that Spider-Man is real, then he
becomes a swinging physics problem.
Physics again. Spiders and other very tiny creatures have "super" strength simply because they are very tiny.
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