The Physics of Superman

eieken writes "The physics of Superman mostly belong in the realm of comic books, but some scientists decided to give their input on the matter. The article tells of 'a scientific experiment in which a researcher put several chickens in a centrifuge and raised them in twice-normal gravity for months at a time. When they emerged, the chickens were stronger and had larger bones and muscles, and greater endurance. In other words, they were superchickens.' Do they have human sized centrifuges?"

Comments

I wonder where you approach the limit.....

[groslyunderpaid]

You could only get so much bigger (bones, muscle, etc) before it wasn't an advantage anymore, right? I mean, growing something in higher gravity so that it creates a stronger 'infrastructure' (for lack of a better term) would only be beneficial up to a certain point, at which point the weight of said 'infrastructure' would weight you down so as to defeat the purpose....

DragonBall Z, Goku and Vegeta

[Soong]

They started training at 10 times earth gravity, and were well up over a hundred in just a couple villain intermissions worth of training.

So yeah, train hard, get strong. (as long as you don't break yourself in the process)

Maybe the interesting thing here is not that the chickens got stronger, but that 2g was within their biological limits.

Superman as an Energy Being

[Bombula]

Whenever you hear one of these physics of Superman debates where they ask MIT physicists or whatever, the assumption is always that Superman has his abilities because he has a super version of a human body. So he's super strong and super fast because his muscles are super powerful, and so on. But if this is the case and he's constrained by the ordinary laws of physics, then everything about him from strength to flight to x-ray vision is totally implausible.

However, if you escape from the assumption that he's some fancy biological being, then things change completely. In my mind, Superman is a being composed of energy. His appearance is just a convenient form, a shell. Kryptonian technology seems to be advanced enough for this to be plausible, and it also rids us of the unlikely coincidence that Kryptonians and humans happen to look exactly the same.

Composed of energy and manipulating forces, all of Superman's powers become plausible - as energy, flight makes sense, speed makes sense, and strength could be the transmutation of energy into forces. With Kryptonian technology, it might be possible to create force fields of two dimensions (planes, or surfaces) or three dimensions (volumes, or zones), which you could also view as curving space. Then things like lifting a car by its bumper would make sense, whereas with human phyics you'd just rip the bumper of. And as for lifting continents, if the force required to lift a continent was applied to an area the size of your hand it would pass through any known substance as easily as we pass through air. Strength-by-force-field is the only thing that makes any sense.

Kryptonite also makes more sense with Superman as an energy being. Maybe it gives off some weird particles that interfer with Superman's ability to transmute energy into gravitons or other force particles. Superman being solar-powered makes better sense this way too. And obviously heat vision, x-ray vision, and flying at cose to the speed of light make more sense for an energy being than for a material being.

Well, that's my uberdorkiness binge for the day.