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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.
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!
"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.
For a different point of view, go to Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. In particular, check out their write-up on Spider Man.
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
The Original article appeared in Physics Today, in November 2002.
what sig?
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.
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.
> 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.
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