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."

Comments

chaffing?

[edrugtrader]

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?

Defeats the purpose

[KeatonMill]

I don't know if this occurs to anyone else, but it seems to me that the POINT of comic book characters was that they could do things that defied the laws of physics. I mean, if they couldn't, what would we be left with?

CUBICLE MAN: Able to ignore work at lightspeed

Re:Defeats the purpose

[Quikah]

The point is to get students interested in physics by using a novel approach.

Only one more step...

[dghcasp]

Now all we have to do is find the school with the course on "Warner Brothers Animation Physics..."

RoadRunner's 3rd Law: An object at rest will stay at rest, even if suspended in midair, as long as it doesn't look down.

Flash

[daeley]

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. ;)

Spiderman's Web and other guesses

[MBCook]

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.

Re:Spiderman's Web and other guesses

[sean23007]

if he went swinging around like that, it would litteraly rip his arm off.

I tried to explain that to friend of mine who is really big on comic books. He was disappointed at how far away from the original comic books the new movie was. I tried to tell him that the centripetal acceleration on some of those swings would not only tear his arms off, but would send his one armed body into the ground fast enough to make a sizable crater. He didn't understand what I was getting at, and said it was quite obvious how it worked, at least in the comic books, because in the comic books he actually had to build the spider web machines himself, they didn't just "grow into his wrists." I don't see how that explains anything, but he was adamant on the subject, so I decided to leave well enough alone. These comic book fellows are not to be messed with.

Batman and the vat of acid

[jone_stone]

I once had a chemistry test in high school based on a Batman comic. Batman and Robin were falling into a vat of acid. It looked like the end for the dynamic duo. But after they fell in Robin was astonished to find that they didn't get burned.

"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.

Re:Batman and the vat of acid

[ndinsil]

I got a kick out of a freshman physics problem where you had to estimate the velocity of a student falling into the depths of hell by the doppler shift of his scream as heard by a stationary devil. Cool problems really make the boring math go down easier.

Humor - Cartoon Physics

[Seth Finkelstein]

Take a look at Cartoon Physics, e.g.:

Cartoon Law I

Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.

Example

Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second squared takes over.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Already done

[Fruny]

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...

Re:Already done

[circletimessquare]

there is the hannah barbara physics addendum:

(fred flintstone/ scoody doo)

when beginning to run, there is a 2 second delay between rapid leg movement and actual forward momentum. this is accompanied by a goofy xylophone noise.

And don't forget

[Salsaman]

You only fall down when you look down.

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.

Superman's cape.

[AJWM]

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.

Re:Superman's cape.

[Captain Large Face]

Presumably there is also a small sewing kit to mend his shirts after ripping all those buttons off...

Re:Does this couse answers some..

[AJWM]

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 ;-)

Spider-Man catching falling Gwen Stacey

[Seth Finkelstein]

Gwen is knocked from a bridge by the evil Green Goblin, but Spider-Man catches her with his webbing an instant before she hits the water. When Spider-Man pulls her up, he discovers to his horror that she is dead.

While Spidey was shocked, Kakalios was not.

The professor estimated Gwen's falling velocity, applied Newton's Second Law of Motion and calculated the G-forces exerted when she went from 95 mph to a standstill in an instant. "It's not surprising her neck broke," Kakalios says.

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.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

The Mighty Thor

[CaptainCarrot]

He was probably my favorite as a kid, and is one of the more interesting in terms of physics.

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.

Anything to get the students excited

[evilpenguin]

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.

Re:Anything to get the students excited

[Animats]

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.

When I was in engineering school, the final exam in statics for mechanical engineers consisted of designing a flat link, out of a specified grade of aluminum plate, to connect two pins and go around some obstacles. Several hours at a drafting table were allowed. No computer access. No talking to anybody. A scaled drawing had to be turned in.

Each student's link was then machined, by a machinist following the drawing, out of aluminum plate as specified. The link was then placed in a hydraulic testing machine and the specified load was applied.

If the link broke, the student failed the course.

If the link didn't break, the link was weighed, and the grade depended on the weight, lighter weights yielding higher grades.

That's what engineering is about.

Cartoon Physics PhD

[cymraeg]

I already got mine from ACME University.

Re:One word: Spider strength

[Arandir]

Physics again. Spiders and other very tiny creatures have "super" strength simply because they are very tiny.

Re:But the question that will NEVER be answered...

[Odinson]

"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.

Lets talk ecnomics.

[Faux_Pseudo]

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.