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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
---
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
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.
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.
If the physics are so right...
Where's superman? spiderman? batman? the xmen? omg. YOU'RE ALL HIDING THEM FROM ME
scuse while my childhood dreams go down the toilet.
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.
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!
1 5_ 2_c.html
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!
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
"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.
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.
Yeah, but does any comic explain the Slashdot Effect?
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
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
"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?
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.
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.
If I remember correctly it was Krypton's sun that exploded and destroyed the planet, or at least in one version it did. A red sun that went super nova.
;) Also if Krypton had neutron star matter in its core, how come Kryptonite which came from Krypton's core is not super heavy?
;)
:) Clark Kent is also an illegal alien having not been born on Earth, and obviously any papers saying so must have been forged or are false. So Clark Kent aka Superman is breaking Civil Law by claiming to be a US Citizen. So much for his good image. :)
Does Physics provide an answer why pieces of Krypton can harm Superman yet pieces of Earth do not harm Earthlings?
Also if Superman is unable to be harmed and bullets bounce off of his chest, how come there are no holes in his clothes? Current storyline on Superman had him arrive in a pod with no blankets, so they did not use them to create his costume. Kal-El was a test tube baby and sent to Earth in the ship inside of a pod.
Also how does Superman lose his strength when exposed to Kryptonite or Red Solar Radiation, if he was exposed to high gravity he still should have his muscles unless they wore out over the years of growing up in a lower gravity environment. Another theory is that his body absorbs yellow sun radiation like a solar cell and he gets his powers from that. Kryptonite or Red Solar radiation apparently discharges that energy.
Also his relationship with Lois, man of steel and woman of kleenex, need I avoid the details of that intiment relationship should they decide to have children?
Also how can Clark Kent pass physicals when they cannot even draw blood for blood tests from his arm as it is super hard? Also what about prostate tests, I'd hate to be the doctor who does those.
Other things I seem to have a problem with:
Time travel by spinning the Earth backwards, I do not think that this will work and should only cause major earthquakes and other problems.
Just how many powers does Superman have anyway? They seem to keep on inventing them. Super Ventriliquism, Super Hypnosis, Super Telepathy, Super Accounting, are they just making these up as they go along? Maybe they should rename him as Unclear Man as his powers seem to be Unclear.
Also they had Superman in space without the need for air. How is this possible? Just how long can he hold his breath and avoid the effects of decompression?
With muscles that powerful, he should weigh a ton or more. People would be able to notice this as he walks on weak surfaces like wood floors.
Also how is it possible to disguise yourself by combing out that s-curl, putting on glasses, and changing clothes? Someone with the intellect that Lex Luthor claims to have should be able to see through that transparent disguise, but apparently not.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Here's an article (pdf) that Kakalios wrote for the Star Tribune. It discusses the simple physics behind a 1973 Spider-Man issue.
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
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
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.
The Original article appeared in Physics Today, in November 2002.
what sig?
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 (?)
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
The U of M's IT magazine Inventing Tomorrow interviewed Kakalios for its Spring 2002 issue. My favorite quote from the lengthy article:
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"
Flaming'el?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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! (\(-__-)/)
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! (\(-__-)/)
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.)
But (assuming you buy into her power of telekinesis in the first place) you could cause the air to act as a natural lens or mirror, causing the beam to be distorted and deflected...
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
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?
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.
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.
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
Whatever happened to reading the book and applying the concepts?
Its this "creativity" bullcrap I have to put up with in high school that is retarding my education. Instead of giving me points for effectively showing knowledge of and applying the concepts, I get points deducted for not having neat cutesy skits, posters, etc.
They don't hand-hold you in university, why should you be hand-held in high school?
wow. Even a thread link has been slashdotted. '403.9 too many users..'
;)
Your last link was without doubt the worst slashdot post ever. Rest assured that within minutes I was on slashdot registering my disgust throughout the thread
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
Since when does Superman obey the laws of the conservation of angular momentum??
"Most interesting how often you humans seem to obtain that which you do not want" -Spock
Actually most all telekinetic abilities are impossible.
... If it were on Yoda, then it would crush and kill him. 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!
Pushing something with your brain completely violates Newton's 3rd law. You would have to explain where the equal and opposite force is.
If Yoda is holding a spaceship up in the air, then there is a mighty big weight pushing down somewhere
Oh and don't think that Magneto's E&M powers can skirt around this. E&M conserves energy-momentum too. You can't do work from nothing.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
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.
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!
(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)
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 had visions of algorithms used to model the cyclic tidal ripples of fat, a sweat/clothing border distribution theorem, statistical analysis of taco/time samples, and linear regression of "Worst ever" comments with respect to Bart displacement.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Superman, while on earth, can hear someone scream on a spacestation beyond jupiter. He can blow out stars while caughing. He can travel several tousand time the speed of light. He can fool people he is a completely different person with just a pair of glasses. What kind of physics can explain 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.
is so Bohr-ing.
hyuk-hyuk
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
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
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
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.
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.
More Than Human eps. 3, on Oct. 17 2003.
Does that mean Superman was circumsized?
Would they have to use a Kryptonite Mogem clamp?
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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
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
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
So let me get this straight then. Superboy was the product of Superman and his cousin Supergirl getting it on? - shades of the Ozarks...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Robin: \psi_1=A{\rm e}^{ikx}+B{\rm e}^{-ikx}, \psi_2=C{\rm e}^{ik'x}+D{\rm e}^{-ik'x},\psi_3=A'{\rm e}^{ikx}
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.
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
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 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?
OSX: Kosciusko *MS* USA
now that's ironic
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?
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.
- Is Captain America's undentable, energy-absorbing shield possible (I think it's made of vibranium, unless that's the one the Black Panther gives him when he's just The Captain and is only kinda unbreakable)?
- How far can Reed Richards, Plastic Man, et al strech before they would run out of material?
- What's the average tumor size of a Marvel Hero from the '60s?
- Isn't it more likely Max Cassidy (aka Electro) would have been killed than turned into a master of electricity (speaking of which, do you think the actor who played a similar role in Misfits of Science still calls Courtney Cox looking for jobs)?
As for stand-up comedians on the topic, I think Dave Chapelle's line about Wonder Woman's trusth lasso ("Damn you got some big titties!") is the best recent stuff.Stone 'im!!! ... Are there any women here?
Two men are drinking in a bar at the top of the Empire State Building. One turns to the other and says: "You know, last week I discovered that if you jump from the top of this building, by the time you fall to the 10th floor, the winds around the building are so strong that they carry you around the building and back into the window."
The Bartender just shakes his head in disapproval while wiping the bar.
The 2nd Man says: "What, are you a nut? There is no way in hell that could happen."
1st Man: "No, it's true, let me prove it to you." So he gets up from the bar, jumps over the balcony, and careens toward the street below. When he passes the 10th floor, the high wind whips him around the building and back into the 10th floor window and he takes the elevator back up to the bar.
The 2nd Man tells him: "You know, I saw that with my own eyes, but that must have been a one time fluke."
1st Man: "No, I'll prove it again!" and again he jumps and hurtles toward the street where the 10th floor wind gently carries him around the building and into the window. Once upstairs he urges his fellow drinker to try it.
2nd Man: "Well, what the hell, it works for you, I'll try it." He jumps over the balcony, plunges downward, passes the 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th floors ... and hits the sidewalk with a splat.
Back upstairs the Bartender turns to the other drinker: "You know, Superman, you're a real asshole when you're drunk."
--Thank you for the suggestion. Half a moment...
]READY
$ export TARGET="disbelief-suspensors"
]READY
$ time pahse-three diagnostic
* SYNTAX ERROR *
]READY
$ time diagnostic (phase3
(whirling doodad)
] Diagnostic complete for disbelief-suspensors. == Results: INCONCLUSIVE.
real 1m38.782s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.050s
]READY
$ _
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
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.
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.