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Comic Book Physics
An anonymous reader writes "Seems many of the feats of SpiderMan, Superman and other superheroes obey the basic requirements of physics. So says a University of Minnesota physicist who uses nothing but comics to teach the subject. 'Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect ... I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics.' Especially cool: Why Krypton *had* to explode."
How do the breasts of all those super-heroines manage to defy gravity so well?
http://jpaudio.com/bullshitgas/comic_book_guy.jpg
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
Krypton had to explode. If it did not, there would have been no incentive for Kal'el to send his son to Earth. Without Clark landing on Earth, the whole Superman series wouldn't have made much sense.
That said, has anyone noticed that the names of the Krypton citizens were all slightly Jewish? Jor'el, Kal'el, and the others all sound like townships in Israel.
Maybe it's just me.
I have been pwned because my
I've always found the physics to be amazing, and something to aspire to. I'm sure everyone has.
Naturally, it's not possible.
It's rather disappointing to be among the people on earth that don't have super powers, but I suppose we'll live. The fact is, us comic readers (as well as anime-watchers and game-players) constantly see heroes that seem to know when to do the right thing at the right time. No matter how stupid an anime hero can be, he (she?) always seems to be able to take on 20 enemies at once and see a punch coming a mile away. It's the same sort of thing with this comic book physics stuff. These heroes have super powers and they don't appreciate them the way we would. You know what I mean. If you were Superman, you would totally pick a fight with some big dude, and then punch him in the face. You know you would.
Faster than a speeding packet! More powerful than a Beowulf cluster! Able to leap tall datacenters in a single click!
Apparently, the Slashdot Effect is the kryptonite of the net.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Alas, they couldn't widthstand the all powerfull Slashdot ray.
Mirrors anyone?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
This principle is also surprisingly evident in "The Simpsons":
Martin: I would've thought that being hit by an atomic bomb would've killed him.
Bart: Now you know better.
His custume is made from the material he was wrapped in on his journey from Krypton. Sheesh, even I know that :-)
RedFive jedi_knight111@hotmail.com
Oh, ja - dey are from de Hall of Lutefisk!
Sorry - it's late.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Apparently the shirt is made from the same stuff as the Hulk's pants. It cuts down on the special-effects budget for Superman movies, and eliminates the fuzzy blue dot and R-rating budgets for Hulk movies.
In the older Superman TV shows, it was funny that he could stand there and deflect bullets, and yet he ducked when the shooter ran out of bullets and threw the gun at him.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
"Meanwhile... Microsoft Reports Crazy Three Month Uptimes on Windows 2003!"
Batman: Robin, take out your BatPDA and boot up PocketPC 2003.
Robin: Golly gee, Batman, why is everthing BatThis and BatThat? I feel left out.
Batman: Ok, boywonder, we'll call it the RobinPDA.
Robin: Holy Bitrate, Batman. That sounds stupid.
Batman: Ok, then we'll call it the BatPDA.
Robin: Golly gee, Batman, why is everthing BatThis and BatThat? I feel left out.Batman: I've always wanted to do that.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
All my physics text book had(and I'm being completely serious here) was a bunch of drawings of men looking at little girls in short skirts(the worst was when they were describing tension and had a man staring directly at the behind of a 7 year old girl when she was bent over in an elevator), shirtless boys, and monkeys. What wonderful human beings these physists must have been.
What I liked better is in the TV series, (the old one with George Reeves, not that sappy Lois and Clark), the bad guy shoots at Superman and he stands there with his chest out smiling as the bullets bounce off. The bad guy empties his gun, and with no other options in front of him he throws the gun at Superman, who then ducks so he doesn't get hit.
I'm invisible to attractive women.
As spys/superheros/supervillains always seem to have attractive women as their offsiders I'd be the perfect person to infiltrate their lair.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Well, maybe you can't deflect a beam of light with just "Mind Power."
Because I know I can.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
What is physics defying is how fast that server went down when slashdotted. After 5 minutes at 11:30 it was DDoSed to death. Yay slashdot readers! -Chris /. readers are finally reading the article before they post?
Maybe it means that
"The big question in our lives is how to be at the same time a hedonist and in a hurry" - Alain Ducasse (?)
Superman isn't an idiot. He knows to match velocities before he catches her.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
You don't need to avoid it, but there's little reason to post it here - a link should be enough.
-- this is not a
I think he made them up. I wasn't sure how dubious the characters were until he started talking about GravityMan, The Planetaryelectricfield, StrongNuclearForceGirl and Mr.Inertia
The link between The Combustible and FartBoy was pretty neat, when explaining the hindenberg...
Flaming'el?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
That has to be the most violent analogy I've ever seen used.
The world can be wrong today for once.
You can transfer abilities through touch. If you touch someone hard enough, you'll give them the ability to bleed. :P
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
How about when Lois Lane falls from a building (accelerating at 9.2 m/s^2), and Superman zooms up (accelerating at, oh, let's say, -30 m/s^2 relative to Lois) and catches her, soaring off into the wild blue yonder. This leaves Lois instantaneously changing directions from +9.2 m/s^2 to -30 m/s^2, with a delta of -20.8 m/s^2.
Wouldn't she be better off just hitting the pavement?
I think my difficulties at understanding my electromagnetism classes were partially because of my preconceptions caused by my understanding of light from Green Lantern comics.
Light can be both a particle and a wave... and a big boxing glove or baseball bat depending on the controlling thoughts.
Quantum mechanics dictates that the observer can effect the observed... but only if you have a ring on your finger, otherwise you'll just get your head beaten in by a big green boxing glove or baseball bat.
Color can be emissive (from the light wavelength itself) or reflective (from interacting with something it hits)... but nothing will change, interact, or stop green light unless it happens to be yellow.
The perception of color itself is really just an evolved way humans measure different wavelengths of light but there's nothing particularly special about the range of light we see... except that we can see the two most useful wavelengths: green and yellow.
It's been a while. I don't read Green Lantern nor perform emag calculations so perhaps I've misstated something from continuity or text. C'est La Vie.
"In the older Superman TV shows, it was funny that he could stand there and deflect bullets, and yet he ducked when the shooter ran out of bullets and threw the gun at him."
That's because getting hit in the face with a gun hurts!
However, this raises the question, how could it be cut and tailored? If it's immune to bullets, then one would expect it to resist being cut quite well.
... well I made up where he got the mirror)
Why the same way he cuts his hair!
With his laser vision and an ideal vanity mirror that he apparently got from physics class along side the massless rope and frictionless pully.
(I am not making this up
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
Niven's essay has always reminded me of a joke:
Superman is flying around one night, and spies Wonder Woman sleeping through her open window. Well, Superman has Super-speed, so he figures he can be "in and out" before anyone's the wiser. So, he zips in, does his business really fast, and takes off.
Shortly after, Wonder Woman sits up and asks "what the hell was that?"
The Invisible Man, lying next to her, sits up and says "I don't know, but damn, does my ass ever hurt."
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
(Although Cleveland, Ohio definitely catches a lot of that too.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
In one of the most hilarious short science essays ever written, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, Larry Niven tackles the problem of how Superman is going to reproduce.
For example, during orgasm, one loses control of one's muscles. Superman has been known to leave fingerprints in steel and concrete accidentally. What happens to Lois while she's in his arms?
Another example, which I'll quote directly:
Followup scenarios (for artificial insemination) assume that he's on an airless moon, to prevent the semen from exploding into vapor due to air friction at supersonic speeds. It eventually turns out artificial insemination doesn't work either.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
is so Bohr-ing.
hyuk-hyuk
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Yes, yes it does. In fact, I suggest you try this at your first opportunity. Just remember, the webbing you shoot from you wrists may be very fine. So you may not see it, or even feel it. But trust me, it is there, so go ahead and jump off the ledge and start swinging.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Better that than Neo breaking the sound barrier (buildings exploding in his wake) and no (additional) damage to Trinity after catching her.
I think that's not a valid comparison. Inside the matrix, Neo does NOT have super powers in the same sense that superman etc. have. Neo's power is basically that he can manipulate "reality". If he can rewrite one law of physics, why should momentum be an issue? Even Trinity (and Morpheus etc.) could rewrite physics to a lesser extent to enable them to jump huge distances and so on.
To be honest, the only real question is why he decided to fly rather than say, teleport. Another option might be turning the floor to sponge like in the training leap. The only answers I can come up with are:
"It generates more tension in the film."
"Neo is an idiot and never considered the idea."
As an aside, I've always wondered why he bothered with martial arts once he had discovered his powers. Simple tactics like ramming agents at supersonic speeds would be much more effective. He may have had no choice against agent Smith (something of a special case), but normal agents shouldn't even have made him slow down.
I think this all goes to prove that you should never let a gamer near dodgy physics. Or dodgy backgrounds. We'll rapidly find a way to exploit the holes.
- Blah blah blah, missing scientist. Blah blah blah, atomic bomb. -
Likewise, there's the paradox of heros who have super-strength but not invulnerability (e.g. spider-man).
Yep, this brings up one of my all-time favorite roll-your-eyes scenes, from a Superman in the 70's.
Some doofus found a magic flute which stole Superman's powers, one at a time, and transferred them to himself. So he takes away Supe's flight and invulnerability. When Superman catches up to the doofus, he still has his super-strength, so he bursts through a brick wall.
Now, I'm no physicist, but I know if I could somehow move my arms with enough force to smash through a brick wall, I'd end up with a pair of stumps and something resembling bloody jelly.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
The rest of the Wyle E. Coyote ones are just as good. 'Though I don't think he handles momentum in a physically accurate way, he does have an engineers' appreciation for Murphy and His Laws...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
There was actually a joke about the Hulk and his purple pants. (They were always purple in the comic book for a long time.) Anyway, it was in Power Man and Iron Fist. Power Man was superstrong and while I don't think he was invulnerable, he was difficult to damage. Anyway, he favored wearing yellow silk shirts as part of his costume and they were ALWAYS getting torn up.
:)
One issue he was stopping by to pick up a bunch of yellow silk shirts and they clerk was handing a pile of purple pants to a Dr. Banner.
One more explanation:
Superman would duck the thrown gun because just standing there like a doofus while a pistol bounces off your forehead looks stupid.
Even superheros who pretend to be mild mannered reporters have their pride, ya know?
Martha Kent took the kid's baby blankets, un-wove them thread by thread (since trying to cut them was a good way to break scissors, although eventually they could trim the thread with his x-Ray heat vision), and then re-wove them into his outfit, re-un-weaving and re-re-weaving as he grew from boy to man.
;-)
That was before women's lib. Now its all "magical force fields" and none of that opressive sewing and weaving.
You can't take the sky from me...
Flattened ovid cows will pack to a greater density in a barrel.
I drank what? -- Socrates
the webbing you shoot from you wrists may be very fine. So you may not see it, or even feel it. But trust me, it is there, so go ahead and jump off the ledge
Tom and Clark were standing on the roof of their building drinking a few beers on their break and Clark said, "Hey Tom, did you know that if you jump off this building, after you get down so far, a draft will pull you back inside the building on the third floor?"
"Get outta here," said Clark.
"No I'm serious, watch me."
Clark hopped off the building and sure enough, he was taken in by the draft at the third floor window. He took the elevator back to the top and Tom and a security guard that arrived were standing there, Tom in awe.
"I can't believe it." Said Tom.
"I know you should try it Tom."
So Tom hopped off and plunged into the ground.
"Superman, you're a real asshole when you're drunk." said the security guard.