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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."
A man shoots a bullet toward superman's chest, the bullet bounces off. No problem... I can buy that.
What I can't accept is, why is there no bullet holes in the shirt? Do superheroes wear some special brand? Study that...
I found it very engaging. It was somewhat lightweight, but very entertaining! The U of MN is doing good with this guy.
/. can help me out? Lefsa-Man, The IceFisher, SnowmoBelly . . . maybe these are DC characters?
However, he mentioned a few superheroes that I've never heard of before -- maybe
I remember last year for the mid-year intercession at my high school> , there was a whole week long class devoted to showing the FLAKEYNESS and INCORRECTNESS of comic book physics. 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.
It's the biomechanics. I love to see superheroes bend the rules of biomechanics and the architecture of the human body. One of the reasons we suck at climbing and bounding around in trees is that our shoulders and wrists are not developed to do so. The freakiest thing you will ever see up close is a gibbon skeleton. I know ole Spidey was using his spider stuff, but you know he needs a sauna and a shiatsu to get the ache out of his shoulders.
finally i can talk about comics and not be off-topic!
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t ml
In issue 15 of walt disneys donald duck adventures, story "the mad chemist", from 1944 by carl barks.
a letter arrived from joseph b lambert of the cali institute of tech, pointing out a curious refernece in, "the spin of states of carbenes", a tech article soon to be published by P.P. Gaspar and G.s. hammond in Carbene Chemistry.
It seems donald's reference to CH2 was years ahead of its time: the existance of this elusive chemical intermediate had not been proven in 1944.
http://www.uky.edu/Projects/Chemcomics/html/dd_
shows him in action on page 2!
ah and i found the text i was trying to type out from the actual comic...
http://www.seriesam.com/barks/detc_wdc0044-x1.h
god i love comic books.
flaming carrot is top notch. go bob burden!
The creators of Superman were Jewish. They needed names that sounded alien for the characters, so they just used Hebrew sounding names, which at the time wouldn't be that well recognized by the general public.
An interesting thing along the same vein for readers of Battle Angel Alita (aka Gunnm) "The Physics of Tiphares" http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Fuji/7539/phys.html
Turns out the comic book writers put more thought into it that you would have first thought!
Although I dont know if I could still believe that superman could fly around the world and turn time backwards...
Nerdy kid:I'm looking for a Batman for my Batmobile.
Lee:Who about a nice "Thing" action figure?
Nerdy kid:Uhh no,I need a Batman!
(Lee smashes a thing figure into the Batmobile so it's legs are sticking out the floor)
Nerdy kid:You broke my Batmobile!
Lee:Broke,or made better!
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
proving that superman wouldn't be able to just stand there and deflect bullets.
you cannot prove what is claimed, you can only set up specification boundaries for exactly what Supermans makeup must be in oder to do it.
Throw in an infinite amount of strange physics and you have a pointless excersice, and unsuprising. Much better to find the examples where physics was well understood, and promote that.
-pyrrho
I grew up on comics - I still have over 1000 of them from the '70s and '80s, stuck back in a closet, wrapped in plastic.
What the good Professor says is not that all comic book situations are based in physical reality -- that's absurd. You don't get to teach at a Big Ten university by being a knucklehead.
He's saying that there are instructive cases, and furthermore that those cases are often the essential ones needed to understand the underlying physics. He's saying that look, this situation that seems like over-the-top unreality is in fact pretty close to the way the universe actually works.
I give him credit for having the guts to teach that way.
sigs, as if you care.
The original hulk tv show was bunk as far as hulk powers go :) I didn't care for the movie, but it was true to hulk's abilities from the comic books.
:) Or just tell yourself it's plasma and not a laser (in many cases this seems to be the case, as it doesnt ever seem to really go in a straight line)
As for the Cyclops thing, that kinda threw me, but she is telekinetic, so you can make up something about compacting air molecules to refract the light or something
Spider-Man I loved except for one thing: Spidey is supposed to be a very sarcastic smart-ass...this didn't show through near enough
Go and read this article about one of the creators of Superman.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
The U of M's IT magazine Inventing Tomorrow interviewed Kakalios for its Spring 2002 issue. My favorite quote from the lengthy article:
Cyclops doesn't shoot lasers from his eyes. He shoots beams of concussive force.
You get double Dumbass points for that and liking the live-action Spawn movie, which has the oh-so scientific premise of a dead man being resurrected by Satan.
Sure you could create a program or a chart carefully detailing what the mass and content of the planet is, and then you could find out how much gravity is created, followed by the thickness/thinness of the atmosphere, followed by the way evolution has grown on the planet (such as a world where the majority of land mass is earth rather than water), etc etc.
Or you could just reach for a high school physics book and base your comics on simple, easy to understand and apply physics. Its common to see this in everything from novels to video games. (We're playing video games that are supposed to take place in hundreds of years in the future where portable handheld rocket launchers can reload in less than 2 seconds and interstellar travel is possible, but we're still using a bread-and-butter assault rifle and grenade launcher attachment as our main weapon. Wheres the laser beam weapons? The jetpacks? The microwave guns? The robot armies? The pistol sized one shot super gun? A version of Windows which doesn't crash... ok maybe thats a little too imaginative.)
From the pratical point of view, not every physics student will have enough knowledge of comics. So imagine someone not learning physics because of a, hmmm, calculus issue, but because he/she doesn't read enough comics!
I shot the sheriff
I've only seen the previews of the Hulk movie, but with the tank, IIRC, the hulk grabed the turret and swung the thing around? I really wanted to see the body suddenly fly off, leaving the Hulk only holding the turret, as, again, IIRC, tank turrets are held in place simply by gravity.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
the blades are adamantine (i think i got the metal right.... sure as hell isn't steel) and blades sharp enough down to an atomic level wouldn't need alot of force.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Kryptonite affected all people on Krypton so they were, in a sense, just like earthlings. They did not have super powers because the kryptonite kept them normal.
Ma Kent claimed him as her child, and since they lived in the country, were never questioned about it. So all records would be based on good faith
He didn't have an instruction manual in the pod. No one on Krypton had any super powers because of the kryptonite, so he doesn't know what he can do and sometimes discovers latent powers.
He can fly, remember? He just cancels out all but about 190-200lbs.
The answer to all the other questions are this: He's Superman
For example
What turns on a kryptonian? What arouses Kal-El's mating urge? Did kryptonian women carry some subtle mating cue at appropriate times of the year? Whatever it is, Lois Lane probably didn't have it. We may speculate that she smells wrong, less like a kryptonian woman than like a terrestrial monkey.
Can human breed with kryptonian? Do we even use the same genetic code? On the face of it, LL could more easily breed with an ear of corn than with Kal-El. But coincidence does happen. If the genes match...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
His class covers other topics such as these, that I'd really like to know the answers to:
# Is it possible to read minds as Prof. X of the X-Men does?
# How much does Flash have to eat?
The second one I'd like to know because I figured out, when I was a kid, how much a regenerating troll would have to eat. (Yeah, I'm a computer geek *and* a dungeons and dragons geek.) Basically it works out that even if they're eating pure sugar, there's not enough hours in the day for them to do that.
The Professor X one is interesting because I took a psychology class in which the professor told us in no uncertain terms why telepathy was impossible. He went into the mechanics of information processing in the brain and the differences between patterns in two different brains, and concluded based on this set of facts that even if you could detect the signal generated by someone else's brain, you wouldn't be able to parse it.
To me this was preposterous, and I defended my position (unconvincingly, at the time) during his office hours. Signal processing is signal processing, and it doesn't matter whether the signal generated by the receiving station has any relationship with the signal generated by the sending station, as long as the receiver can process it. The human brain's ability to process the signal generated by the human mouth is probably not significantly more complex a task than the hypothetical ability to process the brain signal. You're not, after all, trying to glean the meaning of every nerve firing, just see what the person is thinking about. In a very real sense this is only a step away from what the person is saying, so why would the signal be more difficult to parse than human speech?
In my mind the only question remaining is whether there is any signal to be processed at all. I say that because you can detect the brain signal without drilling a hole in a person's head, that it is there to be detected, it's just a matter of having sufficiently sensitive equipment to detect it. Does the brain have this? Hard to say.
I want to know what conclusion the prof reaches.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
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.
having suffered through Physics for Engineers 1 and 2 at the U of Minnesota three years ago, I only wish I had been able to take this class; that would've made the whole experience just a wee bit more enjoyable. oh well. At least I showed up often enough to my classes to still get my computer science degree...
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
First off we need the distance. Let's assume Krypton circled the nearest star to our own (we are looking for the minimum size of Krypton). Proxima Centauri (or Alpha Centauri C) is only 4.22 light-years away. (393 927 289 812km)
Imagine a sphere whose radius extends from where the planet Krypton used to be, to the earth. The surface area of this sphere represents the 3-d area across which the shards of kryptonite were distributed. This sphere has a surface area of 4.87508x10^23km(standard calculation).
The earths radius represents a fraction of this total surface area. The earths radius is 6.3781 x 10^3km. multiply by pi to get the area (the area is 2-d -ie not squared- because the surface of a sphere is 2-d). The next step is comparing this 2-d surface area to the surface area of the imaginary sphere we got above. The result: the earth represents a TINY 4.110086 x 10^-18% of the surface area of our Krypton-explosion sphere. If we multiply the amount of kryptonite on earth by the inverse of this number, we get the amount of Krypton that is scattered around the entire surface area of the sphere.
And how much kryptonite is on the Earth? damned if I know, so let's just estimate based on what we know of the series. It's been made into various weapons and devices, been sold over the blackmarket, been hidden in secret storage areas, been acquired by every evil organization or villian ever, so presumably the amount on Earth is quite high. BUT, we are calculating for a minimum size of Krypton, so we'll estimate low. 10kg seems more than fair. Now, 2/3 the Earths surface is water, and i haven't heard of any kryptonite being recovered from undersea explorations, so that 10kg found on earth was the 1/3rd that hit the land. So, 30kg hit the Earth. Also consider burning up on reentry. I don't know of kryptonite being indestructible, and it has been made into a liquid at least once in Superman history. Its Probable that at least 90% was burned up in reentry. (If someone with more precise figures and re-do calcs t'would be appreciated). so, the 30kg that hit the earth represents only 10% of the 300kg that hit the atmosphere.
multiply this by the inverse of this by the inverse of the fraction that represents the surface of our Krypton-explosion sphere over our earths surface area sphere. The result: The planet Krypton weighed an absolute minimum of 7.299x10^19kg. By comparison, our sun weighs 2x10^30kg.
The "el" ending means "god" (essentially), so it's not surprising that these names end up sounding slightly Jewish.
In Hebrew "el" as a suffix could mean "God" or "Of God", for example if we were to look at the names of angels Michael means "who is as God", Gabriel translates to "God is my strength" or possibly "my strength is God", Israel means "Striver with God", Usiel means "Strength of God", Raziel means "the secret of God".
At one time Christians were so fond of tacking on el to the end of a word to create an angel that in 745 the church forbade the faithful to call on any angel other than Raphael, Gabriel and Michael. (the three mentioned by name in their canonical teachings)
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Dude,
Here is a picture of a frog levitating in a 16 Tesla (160,000 Gauss) magnet. According to this page, humans have a similar diamagnetic susceptibility to frogs.
Thus, if you could apply 16 Tesla or more over the volume of a human, he/she will levitate.
Cheers,
Johann
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
But if you put someone else's impulses on your brain, wouldn't you become them?
Telepathy is basically an emulation problem. Even if there was some way of extracting the neural state of someone else's brain, what would you do with that information?
What you're suggesting is that you would have enough brain-power (fuzzy concept) to emulate someone else's mind, AND be able to interpret that emulation in some fashion. Assuming you're both human, how would that work?
And what would a telepathy actually perceive? Someone's sub-vocalized self-commentary? An echo of how they're feeling. Drill deep, and you'll realize you really don't have much of an idea of what telepathy would actually be like.
Heck, it's not like our own self-awareness is much beyond post-hoc justification.
My video compression blog
I don't remember who said it, but there's a saying, "Given enough steps, anything can be proven."
I think this applies. Consider the physics of someone like the Hulk - as he grows, his strength -must- grow exponentially, simply to be able to deal with his larger body mass. Not proportionately.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
In comic books, being still frames with no sound, any action, motion, sound, can be implied, but it's really up to our imaginations to create the vivid scene that is real to life; and we do that with the feel for real world physics that we experience in real life. I would guess that this has something to do with comic books tending to be a bit more realistic; so they can leverage our own experience with the physics of the world, for a more realistic and vivid experience.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Actually, in the first sentence of the bible ("In the beginning god...") uses the plural form of the word, "elohim", so it actually says "In the beginning the gods...". Elohim is used more than 2000 times throughout the old testament.
Might be because lots of the storys are older myths from other religions (for instance the flood story which is found in Gilgamesh and lots of other places)
My collegue has this book "CPU no tsukurikata", or "How to create a CPU". The lovely Japanese gothic lolita manga character guides you through breadboarding a CPU with descrete components.0 9.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
o oks/4839909865/249-8715141-2165156)
http://cdn-images.amazon.com/images/P/4839909865.
(japanese amazon page for the book http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/b
The creators of Superman were Jewish. "Kal-El" means something like "All that is God" in Hebrew. (Not sure on Jor-El.) Superman was created around the time of World War II, a time when the Jewish people of Europe were especially beset upon. His homeland is destroyed and his people eliminated -- sound like anything familiar? He is placed in something like a basket and floated out into space, a parallel to Moses. He is raised by a people not his own and rises to prominence in that society, also similar to Moses.
Superman is actually a Jewish icon! He was created to give hope and encouragement to Jewish people the world over during a particularly bleak period in their history.
In Japan, you'll find Manga for everything from world history to automobile repair. It's just one of those things.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This is wrong. Superman is as strong as he is because of the yellow sun of the Earth (as opposed to the red sun of Krypton). The comics say nothing about how massive the planet is, just that the Earth's sun gave him super powers. Plus, he is not really jumping, he's flying. This description does not lend itself to description by the laws of physics, but that's okay.
Most phenomena in comic books is completely wrong according to the laws of physics (the law of conservation of energy is the most often flauted--with energy fields being created spontaneously, and the law of conservation of momentum is violated every time somebody flies without any means of propulsion).
We like comics because they are fantasy. Even if you can find some accurate depictions of physical phenomena in comics, it is a dangerous enterprise to use comics to teach physics. If students are taught that some "comic book physics" is accurate, then they may come to believe that all such physics is accurate.
For a dose of semi-reality in comics, I turn to Batman, the most bad-ass human ever to be dreamed up. But even Batman is not that physically accurate. The first time he shot up a grappling hook to save him from falling off a building, his arms would be ripped clean off. But I don't care. Batman is cool.
In my opinion, physics should stay away from comics, because thinking about the physics involved in comics makes them not fun, since nearly every cool thing that happens in comic books defies the laws of physics.
It ain't manga, it's looks somewhere between a hobbyist book and serious text, not that i could read it beyond the diagrams. All i know is that cute gothiloli chick is the sensei, and she's the first thing that came to mind with the article title "Comic book characters teach physics" :)
...is the failure to understand weight, gravity, and balance. Very often, one sees a "superstrong" character lifting, say a truck, by grabbing it at one end and picking it up. But no matter how strong you are, if you are going to lift something, the combined center of gravity of the object plus you has to be be between your legs, or you will fall over. So you might be strong enough to carry a truck if you were underneath it, but no matter how strong you were, you couldn't pick it up from one end unless you were considerably heavier than the truck itself. Superman, by the way, is presumably an exception to this, since he is apparently immune to gravity--so he could probably lift a big weight from one end by "flying downward". A classic older cover drawing of Superman, back when he couldn't fly, but only "leap tall buildings," showed him lifting a car "realistically"--over his head like a weight lifter.
A related error is an unrealistic notion of the strength of materials. You can't pick a car up by the bumper; it will just break off.
But it is manga. It's a textbook in manga form, and it's common. For example, "Introduction to the Japanese Economy."
From http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/articles/man ga/manga2-1.html
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The topic is supposed to be comic books and physics. Comic books are a much-maligned, yet fascinating form of art. The conjunction of art and science should have made for a fascinating thread, but alas, it didn't.
Classic physics nonsense from the comic books includes:
- Superman flies faster than a speeding bullet but does not make a sonic boom.
- Iron Man flies thanks to his boot jets, but does not have incredibly strong stomach muscles.
- Lots of problems where the energy for Superman style mentally guided flight, force fields, and the like. It's not enough to say "manipulation of gravitons." What is the mechanism for manipulating gravitons? Where does the energy come from to power the mechanism? How exactly does the superhero control the mechanism?
- Many powers come from "another dimension." I'd like to visit one of those. Oh. I guess that's impossible. Because they don't exist.
- Extra-dimensional travel seems ridiculous. There are no "parallel Earths."
- Time travel, like the second Flash (Barry Gordon). Teleportation, like Nightcrawler. Bleargh. Nuff said.
- How does Batman stay young after all those decades of crimefighting?
- Shrinking or growing, like Hank Pym. Where does the mass go?
- The whole telepathic communication with other beings, whether with humans or aniamls, makes no sense. Aquaman is silly. Another problem is the "danger sense" of Spider-Man.
- Any really strong character needs to have body armor or tough skin, or he is going to get seriously hurt. Take Sub-Mariner. He can punch holes in steel, but he cuts easily. He should have bled to death by now.
- Biological processes are never really explained. Just how does Wolverine's "fast healing" work? They never explain.
The best superhero characters are those that are most plausible. These include Batman, Iron Man, and the relatively low powered characters. It shouldn't be surprising that these are the characters with the most developed and most interesting back stories.A highly powered character like Superman can be made into a great character by weaving in a tragic flaw or two. Superman not only has to watch out for Kryptonite, he never has a satisfying love life that can last. (Yeah, the physics of him having sex. Har har.) Kal-El (Superman) is a brokenhearted man. He is the last of his race. He wants to help mankind, and will do whatever he can with his superpowers to be of service. But in the end, he is lonely, isolated. In some ways Kal-El is like a religious figure.
The other route is to make a character based on principles that are far beyond what modern physics can suggest. The prototype is Silver Surfer. While Silver Surfer is a great character, the reader can never really relate to a totally alien being like him.
The best route is a superhero without superpowers, or very few superpowers. Gadgets, martial arts, and wits fill the gaps. That's how to make a great superhero character.