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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?
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.
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
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!
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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!
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.
"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.
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
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?
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"
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
> What was the explosion called? Flaming'el?
Nah, I'm pretty sure it was "Bloody'el."
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.
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.
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.
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?