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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?"
But can the superchickens fly now?
Funnypics
Is it time to welcome our new super-chicken overlords?
Support a true independent artist - Leila Lopez
Looks like they should have put their web server in the centrifuge as well...
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the chickens will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new centrifuge generated superchicken overlords.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
see the book "The Physics of Superheroes". It's about exactly what you would expect.
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....
My grandma used to kill chickens by twirling them over her head to break the necks, then throwing them down. Like to see her try that with a "superchicken"!
Can't you just see it? Hank comes outside to find his wife, and there the is, cornered in the hen house. "Look out Hank! That one by the door knows judo or something!"
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Psyclo, the dark night.
Mike, the computer geek.
Super Grover unavailable for comment.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
Apparently they tasted just like Christopher Reeve.
When you find yourself in danger,
When you're threatened by a stranger,
When it looks like you will take a lickin',
There is someone waiting,
Who will hurry up and rescue you,
just Call for Super Chicken!
Fred, if you're afraid you'll have to overlook it,
Besides you knew the job was dangerous when you took it
He will drink his super sauce
And throw the bad guys for a loss
And he will bring them in alive and kickin'
There is one thing you should learn
When there is no one else to turn to
Call for Super Chicken!
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
Everytime you mod me down, a scientist centrifuges a chicken.
Please, think of chickens.
Ask and ye shall receive.
I think a rotisserie is like a really morbid ferris wheel for chickens. It's a strange piece of machinery... "We will take the chicken, kill it, impale it, and then rotate it. And I'll be damned if I'm not hungry! Because spinning chicken carcasses make my mouth water! I like dizzy chicken. With a side of potatoes of some sort."
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
For anyone interested in the development of Supermans powers as the series progressed, check out this website:
http://www.johnath.com/~david/etc/superman.html
As other posters have mentioned, yes, it is true that he started without flying ability -he could leap only one eighth of a mile. The development of his powers is actually quite staggering, going from what nowadays would be a lesser superhero, to being one of the most powerful superheroes in the combined comic book multiverse.
I've heard rumors to the effect that if you attack them with a sword repeatedly, it will send a call out to dozens of other superchickens which will all attack you until you flee indoors or scroll to the next area.
God spoke to me.
If you want to read more details, use the "Inside Book" search on Amazon within the Great Mambo Chicken.
From the search results link above, visit pages 54 and 55 - the sidebars navigate to the next and previous pages.
No I have no affilate link in there (that I am aware of) - call me crazy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When I was an undergrad taking lower division Newtonian Physics my prof assigned a problem set along the lines of:
"Superman: the man of steel. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound:
1) Calculate Superman's kinetic energy to go faster than the bullet
2) Determine the amount of work Superman would do pushing against the locomotive to make it go backwards 1 km on a level track
3) Compute the impulse generated by Superman to leap a tall building
Most of the class did OK, I got all the answers in the ballpark, but one student had answers that were an order of magnitude greater than anybody elses'. When the prof asked the student why his answers were so high, he replied "Well, it seems as if I used a higher mass than anybody else - you DID say that Superman was the man of steel, didn't you?"
He got full credit.
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.
Start Running Better Polls
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.
A-Bomb
I worked in one of those for a whole summer once. I was that dude in the centre with the speed button. So I basically spent about 12 hours a day spinning for about 4 months. The trick to not getting totally fucked up was not to move your head outside the plane of rotation. Move head left and right, fine, but if you moved up and down it was trippy. At the end of every ride, someone would always ask why I wasn't sticking to the walls...
;)
The amusement park was right beside a beach so I'd get chicks coming in with their two piece bikini's. At a certain speed of rotation, the panel you lean against would slide up. At this speed and force, a lot of the women couldn't lift their arms and hands away from beside them - they were as good as pinned down. It took me a few weeks, but I pefected tweaking the speed just right to have those panels slide up and down repeatedly. And in doing so, I managed to "jiggle" many a breast out from under a bikini top!
Yeah, I'll go to hell, but damn, it made the job worthwhile
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
Given that he's powered by the Sun, I'd lean more towards an optical nervous system.
I'd lean more towards getting out more.