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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."
i was always curious about what those tights would do to your crotch after a good fight with a super villian.
also, did they figure out what supermans cape does? does it provide lift somehow?
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
CUBICLE MAN: Able to ignore work at lightspeed
Actually invited a colleague's physics class
into my lab for them to pick a hero and do a report on the different abilities. The kids(high-school) loved it!
Now you know what your kids are being taught now days!
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
All I know is that *I* burn lots of calories yelling at my browser trying loading yet another Flash page.
;)
Flash: Giving Electronica Music a Bad Name Since 1996.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Sweetness...
These remind me of the 'There can't possibly be a Santa Clause because' document. Boils down to the fact that Santa, if he really did visit all the little good, Christian boys and girls would go through reindeer at an alarming rate. He'd lose them to explosions caused by atmospheric friction energy greater than a reentry burn.
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Well, I'm no scientist but it seems to me that if he went swinging around like that, it would litteraly rip his arm off. Does he have an exoskeleton I don't know about?
The flash does burn alot of callories, but unfortunatly, he still eats way more than he needs. This is why he hasn't had a movie (at least not lately), he is now over 600 lbs and can only run at abou 100mph.
Let's see, what other comic books are out there? Superman is just too easy to do (that or I can't think of any right now).
The incredible hulk is actually a very buff man who simply put on some halloween makeup once that caused a skin rash. Unfortunatly, while the makeup washed off, his skin stayed green. I guess this doesn't have to do with physics, does it?
Aquaman prevents his head from imploding when he dives deep because it is, in fact, filled with water and not a brain, as was previously thought. This allows him to equalize the pressure because he has holes in his ear drums. This explains why he spends his time with dolphins and tuna.
Wolverine's system survived the adamantium bonding because he takes lots of Citrical (R), a vitamin that helps prevent ostioperosis and death while bonding rare metals to your skeleton. To do this though, he had to take 2 bottles per day. This added up to so much money that he was forced to join a traveling, crime-fighting circus. They later dropped the circus part and just became the X-Men.
Of course, the last thing that I know is that the Silver Surfer is not actually silver but a rare form of mercury, which is why he is not only neutraly boyant in water, air, and anything else, but explains why anyone who touches him goes insane. I realize that this isn't in the comic books, but if they put that in, would you buy them?
OK, so I got off topic. Yes I made it all up. Sure I've never read a comic book for any of the above heros. Yes, most of it doesn't have to do with physics. Sure you can mod me down. But I got a long post in as one of the first, doesn't that deserve me a +1 "Good Try" mod? Admit it, this was funny. It was also not meant to offend any 300 piple-faced fanboys who might come to my house and trivia me to death about the time when they drew Batman's head 0.01% too small for his body. Those are my nighmares you know. I did mean the first part seriously, but then I got off topic. Oh well.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
"Of course," said Batman. "The acid-neutralizing pills in my utility belt rendered the acid harmless before it was able to burn us."
I don't remember the specific numbers of the question, but it was basically: if there were n gallons of 5 molar HCl in the vat and the pills were NaOH, how much must the pills have weighed? How much energy was released in the reaction, and are Batman and Robin likely to have survived?
Batman would have needed something like two tons of NaOH in his belt, and the resulting explosion would have evaporated all the water and fried the dynamic duo to a crisp.
I do understand that they are doing this basically to make some of these problems more interesting (I could understand it more if this was an elementary or high school class though....why would people taking college level physics courses need comic book subject matter as a motivation?) but it really does kind of miss the point. I.e. with that whole Flash question, it implies that Flash uses his own energy. My understanding of the Flash is that he accesses some mystical Speed Force that actually powers him, and it has nothing to do with burning any energy directly.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
as opposed, for instance, to Jon Katz who
uses comics to push his "post 9/11" agenda
and SW2 disappointment and discuss bullshit myths of nerds rejection (never saw that in Homer).
I never see the Fab 4 discussed ; Mr Stretch or the Invisible look indeed far-fetched,
but about the torch, one can indeed fly with jetpacks (as seen in Thunderball or Duke Nukem), and for the Thing, Mike Tyson pops to mind.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
I always enjoy seeing creative teaching methods. This sounds like a fun class. And while I've never had a "comic book class", I've seen superhero-type questions ("If Superman has X-Ray vision, what's the smallest object he can see?"), and all physics students like to play with the crazy "what if?" questions ("If centripetal force is constant for constant acceleration, what limits how fast I can drive in a circle?").
It doesn't mention in the article, but I presume they tackle realistic problems along with their superheroic counterparts. That's necessary for developing intuition, and can help evaluate the realism or plausibility of the "Flash" cases.
I also think doing rigorous work on unusual cases helps develop abstract thinking and problem solving skills. And those are very important when later dealing with problems (like at work), where the answer isn't in the back of the book.
ShoutingMan.com
This reminds me of the two limited series that both Marvel and DC put out, called "Marvel Universe" & "Who's Who" respectively -- remember them? I used to love those -- they were alphabetically organized compendiums of every character, ship, and base in both of the comic book universes.
The best part was when they used clever but blatant pseudo-science to try to explain away the smaller inconsistencies of the characters (i.e. Q: "How does Superman shave -- his beard must be super strong!" A: "He shaves using a small shard of super hard metal from the rocket he traveled on as an infant from Krypton"). You really got the sense that the writers were having a lot of fun with the characters. I'd love if these series were collected up in a bound/graphic novel format, as they contain a big chunk of my childhood.
~jeff
Now all we have to do is find the school with the course on "Warner Brothers Animation Physics..."
- Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation
- Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly.
- Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter.
- All principles of gravity are negated by fear.
- As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once.
- Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.
- Everything falls faster than an anvil
And more...
TOTAL GEEK MODE ON:
It depends on how you want to interpret any of the gazillion "Origin of Superman" stories. In many of them he didn't start to manifest his powers to anywhere from a toddler to puberty.
So, she could theoretically carry the child to term normally.
Additionally, in many of the DC comics that have taken place in the future, such as the excellent Kingdom Come Lois dies a while back, and Supes ends up conceiving a child with Wonder Woman. The daughter is shown in the Dark Knight 2 that's out now, I believe.
It's an obvious application of Quantum Gravity - when you go over a cliff, you have to look down to collapse the quantum gravity wavefunction, and thus you hit the bottom of the canyon.
the amount of calories
Since "calories" is obviously a plural noun, the phrase should be "the number of calories". Even though we can have fractional calories, the grammatical implication is that it's a countable or integer quantity. For those we use "number of" and, in comparisons, "fewer than" (not "less than").
When we're talking about a measured (vs counted) quantity, that's more like a "real" or "float", then you would use "amount of" -- unless of course you mention the units of measure, which sort of integerizes the whole thing (the opposite of C type promotion rules).
Sorry, but type mismatch in English is something that's been bugging me lately.
-- Alastair
How does Wonder Woman fit into that outfit?
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additionally, even top-notch shooters can't shoot worth a damn, the miss:hit ratio being even worse than the 10:1 real world ratio for urban combat.
According to the comic books I read, Superman's cape has a pouch/pocket in it where he stores his (highly compressed) Clark Kent clothes.
That way they're always handy for him to change back into his secret identity (and I guess with super powers its easy to get the wrinkles out), and he doesn't have to worry about somebody ripping them off from the phone booth where he changed when he's off fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
-- Alastair
If I recall from my younger days, Spidey could military press 80 imperial tons.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What I always wondered is where all that webbing comes from in the first place. I mean, that web cartridge can only fit so much material inside. They do run out eventually, but it always seemed to me like he could get way too much out of each one. In the movie, he can just shoot webbing out of his hands. Where do the proteins come from? I'd think that after swinging through the city for a while, he'd starve to death.
[insert witty quote here]
While the sentiments were probably circulating in fandom circles for a long time, Brodie's question was preceded by Larry Niven's classic short story/essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex which appeared in his collection All The Myriad Ways over thirty years ago (1971). (That link points to what is probably a flagrant copyright violation.) Brodie's question is Niven's point four and six.
;-)
Sigh, some people just lack an education in the classics
-- Alastair
Continuing with the whole Star Wars verses Spiderman/comics thread established by JonKatz a few articles ago, it is interesting to note that Star Wars has also been studied scientifically.
A astrophysics by the name of Jeanne Cavelos wrote book called The Science of Star Wars, where she talks about how Star Wars fuelled her interest in space exploration and discusses the whole science of Star Wars. You also have the online Star Wars Technical Commentaries that discuss the scientific plausability of the movies. It's good to know that imagination of others be it Stan Lee or George Lucas can help people think scientifically about both the real world and the imagined.
aus.music.scrapbook
And here I am correcting him. Who's the geek now?
And the brethren went away edified.
We have three cases here.
There is an excellent book by Larry Gonick and Art Huffman to cover this last area. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062731009 It goes from understanding simple Newtonian and extended body stuff, magnetism and flux, electrical current, to quantum electro dynamics.
It is from this book that I finally grokked *why* a gyroscope will precess or rotate its axis when the axis is not aligned against gravity.
[
Another fun excercise is looking at the physics behind Star Trek. Lawrence M. Krauss wrote a pretty good book on the subject.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
This story-point has in been fact been subject to much, much debate and discussion by fans.
The consensus seems to be that the sudden stop broke her neck, but that this was more a failed rescue attempt at someone who going to die anyway, than a problem totally unknown to Spidey. That is, he was shocked because he thought he'd been able to save her, and failed. Not that he didn't know that he could fail.
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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.
The guy in the car actually does age negligibly less than someone standing around.
It has been proven with experiments. Two atomic clocks were synchronized, and one was kept on the ground while another was put into a plane and flown around at high speed for a while.
Upon return to the ground the clock that had flown had an earlier time than the one that hadn't.
When time flies you have fun!
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
For example, it's pretty well established in the DC unverse that humans can receive a blood transfusion from Superman, and they don't die of hemorrhage from super blood cells perforating their arteries and veins.
So every Kryptonian cell is not "super"-harmful.
Also, Superman is not a total idiot, so he'll undoubtedly be watching a pregnant wife very closely for possible complications from a super-fetus (X-ray vision's better than ultra-sound!). And take action at the first sign of a problem. It's not like they don't have an inkling that it's a high-risk pregnancy.
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Einstein long ago said that time doesn't remain absolute. Time dilation. T = t/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). Physics and whatnot. That's why you can't go faster than the speed of light- you can accelerate forever and always travel below the speed of light. To me, that statement in and of itself is beautiful.
As for the effects of time dilation at real relativistic speeds (close to the speed of light), there are plenty of books, webpages, etc. that talk about it. But a word of advice- if you want to be able to understand it, you need to get the idea of simultaneous actions out of your head. The problem with what you said lies in one word- "while."
I have a headache and further discussing relativity will only make it worse ;) If you want to talk about it later and/or privately, that will perhaps be best.
-bugg
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.
RumbaFlex asked: Oh, and what mind control technique superman uses to keep people from noticing that he is Clark Kent?
He hypnotises them.
In one of the very few Superman comics I have read, some super bad guy goes around creating massive illusions or causing mass hysteria or something like that. So Superman counters by using a giant flying television to Super-Hypnotise everyone to disbelieve any illusions / see what's really in front of their eyes.
Superman spent most of the rest of the comic making excuses as to why he is pretending to be Clark Kent, and covering for where the "real" Clark Kent is, since no one believes his disguise any more.
After the bad guy is caught and Superman un-hypnotises everyone, the comic ends with CK getting an artist to sketch his face. The sketch looks quite different from Superman's face, and Superman figures out that he has been unconsciously maintaining his disguise by hypnotising everyone he meets.
HTH. HAND.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
I already got mine from ACME University.
you don't have to outrun the bear, just the slowest person in your group.
Physics again. Spiders and other very tiny creatures have "super" strength simply because they are very tiny.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The subject "comic book physics" reminded me of the books by Jean-Piere Petite. He wrote some really nice and interesting comic books, and i think he really managed to illustrate some (advanced) physics/mathematics concepts (relativity, black holes, magneto-hydrodynamics, topology, ...) in his books without confusing his audience with mathematical formulae.
I read the books when i was about two years into studying physics (and they were still interesting), and i wished i'd have read them earlier (maybe about the age of 14 or so). The best thing about the books was, that they would teach you to be curious about nature/mathematics (provided some interest in the subject), and to play with your imagination and new concepts.
There's this website about the book, but apparently it isn't very forthcoming (yet) if you aren't interested in french versions of Anselms adventures. I know there is a german translation of the (originally french) comics (which you can still order at amazon), but couldn't find an english one (maybe there is no one, or the main characters first name isn't "anselm").
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Perhaps the inhabitants of Krypton enjoy similar laws of physics as those of Cybertron.
According to the Transformers FAQ the commonly accepted answer to the question "Where does [Optimus] Prime's trailer go when he transforms?" is that each Transformer has access to a personal "subspace" in another dimension that they can use for storage and teleport objects from. The subspace is also used to store weapons and the changes in mass that occur when massive robots change size and weight, into tiny cassette tapes for instance.
So, true believer, perhaps there is some universal consistency in Comic Book Physics - even across different comic book universes (DC vs. Marvel).
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Yeah, yeah physics again. You might at least reference the square-cube law, such as here for anatomy if you want to educate people on why ants and spiders are so strong. It is also a clue as to why you don't find realy big or tall land animals.
There is also a significant problem with flying dinosaurs & even standing up because of square cube law arguments. Some have seriously proposed that oxygen content was higher for the dino's, other suggest that gravity was lower. Point is, that they are so big, square cube law is a problem for us to understand their existence. There are also huge forms of many modern animals in the fossil record that are a problem for us to understannd because of square-cube law (3 ft wingspan dragonflies, foot long cockroaches, sharks with a 12 ft wide jaw, etc.) Really some interesting problems, albeit somewhat off-topic.
Square cube law is a problem in muscle strenth, bone strength, respiriration, reaction speed, heat dissipation, etc. Unfortunately don't know a really good godd/article to recommend.
"The guy in the car actually does age negligibly less than someone standing around."
These experiments were obviously not performed anywhere near the Long Island Expressway during the rush hour starting Memorial day weekend.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
When I was a freshman at the U of California we had a problem set assigned to our freshman physics class (classical mechanics) that was something along these lines:
"Superman: Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Calculate reasonable estimates of the kinetic energy, power, and impulse, respectively, of these feats; show your work."
As we got back our graded papers the professor remarked that we all pretty were much in the ballpark with our calculations, but one student's numbers were considerably greater. That's when the student said, "Well I used a greater mass than everybody else did since I remembered that Superman is the Man of Steel." He got full credit.
He wouldn't fly into space if he's falling at a rate proportional to the curvature of the earth. Now I wonder how fast he'd have to fall...
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Hmm. According to current theory there are 13 dimensions. We exist
in 4 of them so that leaves 9 left over for all the rest. I think the
Star Trek comics have easily surpassed 9 dimensions. Lets not even
consider the number of dimensions an plains that The Sandman goes to.
What I have always wondered about is the economics of comic books. Who
read the death of Superman? Did you see all of the damage they caused
in the final fight between the two of them in a downtown area? I have
seen whole urban areas reduced to ruble but I never see any reference
to insurances policies against mutants. I never here about how the
stock market took a dive while waiting to find out if the world was
going to be destroyed. Do sales of tabloids go up if some one claims
to be caring $super_hero's baby? Where are all of these headlines?
Where are do these Evil_Super_Weapons manufactures get their funding
from? How does a contractor hide the one million dollars that it
earned from doing a upgrade to the Bat Cave from the IRS without them
asking questions? How does Bruce Wayne write off a million here or
there for replacement BatMobils?
Its things like this that caused me a long time ago to stop reading
Super Hero comics. I much prefer the mental drama comics instead of
the physical drama ones.
I mentioned The Sandman above. This is a prime example of the way
things should be done. When the moon is brought down to earth by one
a which for a spell involving the moon goddess, Gaiman makes a
point of mentioning that a hurricane altered its course as a result.
When Dream goes traveling on earth he uses a old Babylonian god that
is an expert at handling transportation issues like customs and knows
how to work the system. When Dr. Dee makes the whole world go insane
you see bits on TV letting you know that the whole world is indeed
going insane and not just the people in the diner. These things
aren't hidden in the background never to thought of like they are in
most comics for fear that it will ruin suspension of disbelief.
I love comics. I just wish that they didn't exist in a vacuum where
not just the rules of physics don't apply but the rules of economics
and media aren't even mentioned.
Ascii artist &
Um, no, not nearly. maybe a ton, maybe two. YMMV, they've upped him to ten tons lately, which I think is getting a bit silly.
He can toss a car, not a bulldozer, and at that he can only toss the car a little way.
But he's strong enough to keep his arms attached to his bod when he's pulling tens of G's.
His passengers should be broken bags of protein, tho. I'd expect he'd take care to make really really short swings if he's carrying his girlfriend.
Well, Peter Parker is only like 5 foot 7 or so...
Can you give a citation for that quote? It's really cool
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
is that when he swings, the web he hangs
by is so long that the pendulum frequency
is ludicrously low. That is why the old
live action Spider Man show only rarely
showed him trying to propell himself that
way: it was slower than molasses in January.
Even in this context, it's an error. "Calorie" is a unit of measurement (see earlier post). It would, however, be quite correct to refer to an "amount of energy" or "amount of heat", and just as wrong to say "a number of heat".
;-)
Or, in a complete sentence: "the amount of heat is indicated by the number of calories".
-- Alastair
> "The guy in the car actually does age negligibly less than someone standing around."
> These experiments were obviously not performed anywhere near the Long Island Expressway during
> the rush hour starting Memorial day weekend
Well, it doesn't apply there; those people aren't actually *moving*.
Chris Mattern
I seem to recall an explination of this having something to do with Superman moving the muslces in his face very rapidly while he was being Superman, thus obscuring his identity.
You'd think his mom would tell him that his face will stay like that if he keeps doing it...
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
OFFTOPIC ;) :S
You know, your sig lends itself to a lot of misunderstandings... like, when you say "destroy all intelligent life", do I destroy "tim.bolbrock"? If I do, I think the mail wouldn't work; if I don't, well, it seems vaguely insulting, if you catch my drift
Just some food for thought
I think it would be cool to rewrite various comics, but do so with more realistic physics, e.g., watch the flash erupt into flames when he runs too fast.
t.
I don't mind if normal phsics don't apply to superhero's but I would be nice if it applied to the things they touched.
There is a tv episode of the flash, where he takes a car a part in about 5 seconds. It would have been cool if all the pieces where red hot.
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