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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
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.