Slashdot Mirror
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."
I thought it was Jorel who sent his son to Earth. Wasn't Kalel the son's (i.e. Superman's) name?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The "el" ending means "god" (essentially), so it's not surprising that these names end up sounding slightly Jewish.
In a Lois and Clark episode, Superman said that he had a small field of invincibility around him that protected his clothing or anything else within its range. I believe that was in response to Lois asking why his suit could be damaged in the closet, but it was never damaged when he was wearing it.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
Can the mutant master of magnetism Magneto levitate people using the iron in their blood?
The iron in our blood is mostly in the hemoglobin, specifically the heme half. Heme is an iron-based complex, in which the iron is IIRC diamagnetic.
Therefore, I do not see how---oh, wait. I guess I'm wrong. Oops. Looks like I need to review my sigma/pi bondage.
This must be a fun course for arts students or something....
-- This message was made with 100% recycled electrons.
"The Science of Superheroes," (Wiley Books 2002) by Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg (introduction by Dean Koontz). Same duo who brought you "The Computers of Star Trek." Weinberg also wrote "Cable" for Marvel.
For a different point of view, go to Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. In particular, check out their write-up on Spider Man.
'Uncanny physics of comic book superheroes' Posted on Sunday, February 15 @ 16:20:59 EST by bjs
Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height. "Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "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."
From the University of Minnesota:
Professor to describe 'uncanny physics of comic book superheroes'
Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height.
Kakalios will describe a freshman seminar class he teaches, "Physics of Comic Books," at 11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 15, during the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle. His talk is part of the symposium "Pop Physics: The Interface Between Hard Science and Popular Culture," one of two symposia in the Science, Entertainment and the Media category.
"Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "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."
Take, for example, the strength of Superman. To leap a 30-story building in a single bound, Superman's leg muscles must produce nearly 6,000 pounds of force while jumping, Kakalios calculates. The Man of Steel was that strong because he was designed to resist Krypton's powerful gravity. But for a planet with an Earth-like surface to have so much stronger gravity, it would need neutron star material in its core--a highly unstable situation. No wonder the planet exploded. Other topics considered in Kakalios' class include:
# Is it possible to read minds as Prof. X of the X-Men does?
# If Spider-Man's webbing is as strong as real spider silk, could it support his weight as he swings between buildings?
# Can the mutant master of magnetism Magneto levitate people using the iron in their blood?
# If you could run as fast as the Flash, could you run up the side of a building or across the ocean, and how often would you need to eat?
"Once the physical concepts such as forces and motion, conservation of energy, electricity and magnetisms, and elementary quantum mechanics are introduced to answer these and other questions, their real-world applications to automobile airbags, cell phones, nanotechnology and black hole formation are explained," said Kakalios. "The students in this class ranged from engineering to history majors, and while not all were comic book fans, they all found it an engaging and entertaining way to learn critical thinking and basic physics concepts."
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Here's an article (pdf) that Kakalios wrote for the Star Tribune. It discusses the simple physics behind a 1973 Spider-Man issue.
The Original article appeared in Physics Today, in November 2002.
what sig?
Also seen on Slashdot here in May 2002, so it's a repeat, but from a while ago.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here's a gibbon skeleton.
Daniel
The problem with God is that he thinks he's Richard Wagner
Superman isn't an idiot. He knows to match velocities before he catches her.
Is that so? Watch the movie and tell me you honestly think it looks like he matches her velocity. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, he's slowly moving upwards while she says "You've got me! WHO'S GOT YOU!?"
Like I said. **CRACKA-SQUISH**
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Larry Niven dealt with a lot of this an essay about why Superman is always free on Saturday night.
It deals more with biology and psychology, but there's a lot of physics involved, too.
Heisenberg might have been here.
I would think that this comic explains the Slashdot Effect pretty well. :)
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
actually no. nice try though.
#1 - any deflection in the bullet path ("ricochet") would have to at some point, engage the material as its path curved..
#2 - the material itself would be mashed (and probably torn) just by the sheer collision of a fast bullet and the wall.
What I can't accept is, why is there no bullet holes in the shirt? Do superheroes wear some special brand? Study that...
I'm a big fan of Smallville (surely the next show that WB will stupidly cancel), and whenever clark gets shot, there are bullet holes in his clothing.
Solid titanium?
It would shatter wouldn't it? It's extremely brittle unless in an alloy.
Any metallurgists out there? Edu-ma-cate us!
At least that was the way they told it back around 1960.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Does Physics provide an answer why pieces of Krypton can harm Superman yet pieces of Earth do not harm Earthlings? ;)
There ARE pieces of Earth that harm Earthlings, like plutonium, uranium, etc, etc. You could say we got it worse than Superman. He only has to worry about kryptonite. We have to watch out for several elements that could kill/harm us!
What are you talking about, dude? I know for sure that all the physics in the Fantastic Four is right -- Reed Richards knows this shit cold, man!
Hell - even my Calc-Based Physics Book by Halliday and Resnick from last year had an exercise on p=mv, proving that superman wouldn't be able to just stand there and deflect bullets.
But seriously (well, not so seriously), I have a copy of H&R here (I'm a physics professor). The problem says a gangster is shooting 100 bullets per minute at Superman. Each bullet has a mass of 3 grams, and their speed is 500 m/s. You're supposed to calculate the average force on his chest. The answer is 2.5 N, which isn't even enough to topple my 4-year-old daughter.
What really rapes the laws of physics is that Superman can fly in violation of Newton's third law (or conservation of momentum, which amounts to the same thing). For instance, when he's coming in for a landing, he just kills his momentum. What's he interacting with? Objects can't make forces on themselves! Whatever mysterious method he has for creating and destroying momentum at will, presumably it also accounts for his ability to stop a jumbo jet without recoiling, etc.
BTW, Larry Niven wrote a really funny article called "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," about the horrific consequences if Superman was to attempt to have sex with an Earth woman. You can still find it in print -- it's been anthologized.
Find free books.
and, to paraphrase Calvin, "apparently her superpower is being able to fit into that skin-tight suit".
That was Hobbes. To which Calvin replied, "Nah, they can all do that."
They're adamantium. Adamantine is a real english word that means essentially to have the qualities of a diamond (i.e. its strength, in particular) while adamantium is a fictional alloy that is extremely rare in Marvel comics, and apparently extremely difficult to handle (only Weapon X has reliably manipiulated it besides Magneto), although its trailed by Carbonium (i.e. the coils that Omega Red has) which is easier to find/manipulate but less ...adamantine.
"Stumble before you crawl"
This is what is called a "Freshman Seminar" which is a 2-3 credit class (this one was 2) just to get you comfortable with talking to professors and crap. It's not supposed to be all that serious. I also took "Science of Space Travel", and got an easy A but learned quite a bit. Both were fine classes, U of M is a good school.
Good point though, I vaguely recall the hero of Starbrand contemplating lifting a cruise liner to safety but then realizing it would rip apart if he did.
I won't pick at you for not reading, but I am quite ashamed that the moderators didn't read.
If you stipulate that it is possible for Yoda's brain to remotely exert a force on the spaceship, then it should also be plausible that Yoda can similarly cause his _surroundings_ to remotely exert a force on the spaceship.
I wrote that right here
If it weren't on Yoda, then that really complicates things, because now you have a 3 way interaction between the spaceship, Yoda, and the mysterious point in space that is "really" doing the pushing!
In this scenario, "Yoda's surroundings", the mysterious third party, would be doing all of the physical work and not Yoda himself. That seems very convoluted to me.
I am going to drift off into something I didn't previously discuss.
In that example Yoda makes the spaceship and the ground repell. It couldn't be the air or water, because they would move away and that would be too slippery, or there would be lots of noticable wind/current. You could also argue that Yoda uses a whole bunch of air, but I'm not going to get into that right now. So lets just say that Yoda makes the spaceship and the ground repell.
Now in another situation where an older Luke creates a pocket of air to surround himself in the middle of space, he would have to be making air attracted to air on opposite sides of himself, or air attracted to himself.
So we have this mysterious force that can attract or repell, it's a relatively long ranged force, and the energy levels are pretty dang low. It has to be E&M, there really is no other choice. From here things get an order of magnitude more fucked up, but I will stop for now.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
kevlar's great for stopping a bullet, yet if someone tries to stab you, you might as well be wearing denim.
My Kevlar gloves aren't there to protect my hands from bullets.
Are you just dead wrong, or is there some big difference here?
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
More Than Human eps. 3, on Oct. 17 2003.
Are you just dead wrong, or is there some big difference here?
He's a little wrong.
Kevlar vests are designed to fail. That's why there are multiple layers of Kevlar. Each layer slows the bullet as it fails. The plan is that before the bullet penetrates your flesh, it gives all of its energy to making the Kevlar fail.
I have a Kevlar vest and I stabbed the rear panel with a survival knife. No penetration at all, but I have read of police who were shot with broadhead hunting arrows and the vests were only useful to them as big band-aids.
You're Kevlar gloves aren't uncuttable, they just don't cust as easily as your skin, hopefully you'll get your hand out of the way before the Kevlar in the glove fails.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Does anybody search for dupes beyond the past week? This was posted to Slashdot in May of last year. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/1 0/1827244&mode=thread&tid=133
The mirror was a piece of shiny metal from the space ship that brought him to Earth.
His hair don't grow.
Except in one episode of the comic, where some red Kryotonite makes his hair, nails and beard grow.
He then needed both Supergirl and Superdog to use their heatsight to cut it off.
8 * 7 = 42
It's written "YHWH" simply because hebraic written language doesn't include the vowels. They're supposed to be self-explanatory. AFAIK, Arabic doesn't include vowels either, for that matter.
Not really, the name was SPELLED YHWH, since they didn't need to write the vowels (they were understood). That is definitely not how it was PRONOUNCED.
Some have said the vowels came from the Greek "Adonai" to give you, roughly, Yahowah. That is convenient but not 100% accurate. Other names like Joshua (Yehoshua) and many others contain the divine name have and preserved the proper vowels through common use. The pronunciation was almost certainly Yehowah in Hebrew -- and in English it *is* "Jehovah" (no need to mix languages in a sentence).
How's THAT for offtopic? I never expected to discuss Hebrew phonetics in an article about comic book physics!
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
The delta is 39.2 m/s^2. Don't believe me, make a scale on graph paper and count the little blocks. And yes, we'd have all been better off if Lois hit the pavement once or twice.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I believe you are talking about Tory Allen. A saw her climbing at Climb-Time/Indianapolis, and oh boy, is that impressive!
The story about the chimp is true, check the bio, in the above link.
ASTM Grade 1 Titanium:
E = 103 GPa
%EL ~ 25 (Ductility)
Ti is not considered a brittle material (5%EL). It is about the same as a common steel alloy (1020). However, it is 2.5x as strong. It might not shatter, as Lead is much more ductile than either steel or titanium (~30-60%EL).
Ford
Bullocks. It's written as YHWH simply because, in the Jesish faith, you are forbidden to write out or pronounce the full name of G-d. <-- hence this spelling...
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Oh, and unless your vest is one of the newest military models, a standard FMJ round from a M-16 or AK-47 will go through it. The AK-47 will actually go through both panels - and the wearer - and still have the velocity left to kill someone standing behind you.
.38 Special, and the IIIA will stop .357 Magnum. If you can find a level IV vest, that will stop 5.56mm Nato and 7.62x39mm.
The vests are rated. Level IIA and IIIA are the ones you're most likely to encounter, those will stop 9mm,
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano