Professor to describe 'uncanny physics of comic book superheroes'

University of Minnesota ^ | 15-Feb-2004 | Press release

[AdmSmith]

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL--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."

[AdmSmith]

If this was known by my Granny then she would have saved my Marvel comics.

[AdmSmith]

Physics is fun!

[Martin Tell]

Physics is fun!

Shouldn't that be "Physics are fun"? (minus five for agreement error)

Signed,

An English lit major

[GodBlessRonaldReagan]

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?

During Mike Baron's run as writer on The Flash, he often showed the Flash chowing down mightly after a run - I'm talking 6-10 boxes of cereal, etc.

[Sofa King]

"An English lit major"

Explaining why you think that Physics is plural...

[Cboldt]

Shouldn't that be "Physics are fun"? (minus five for agreement error)

LOL. You got me thinking about terms that have "singular" sense, but sound as though they are plural. I came up with a few, mostly in science and engineering fields:

Mathematics, Dynamics, Statics came to mind. Now I have a replacement for that "Oscar Meyer Wiener" song that was running around in my head.

[jtminton]

I wonder if the classes are going to be held on Friday and Saturday nights, since most college ages people still reading comic books usually aren't busy then.

[jtminton]

ages=aged

[Kirkwood]

"The Man of Steel was that strong because he was designed to resist Krypton's powerful gravity. "

Urgh! This is just flat out wrong. The teacher gets an F. The strength of Superman is not inherent in his body. Everyone knows that Superman gets his amazing superpowers from the radiation of our yellow Sun. The further Superman is from the Sun, the more his strength is weakened. Place Green Kryptonite near him and his superpowers are so much reduced that he becomes even weaker than the average human. Every atom within his body irradiates a force field at a certain distance allowing him to resist external forces upon his body, such as bullets, missiles, etc.

[pctech]

I saw that one too. Nice pick up.

[Political Junkie Too]

You got me thinking about terms that have "singular" sense, but sound as though they are plural.

Money, too.

Five plus five is ten, because ten is a single quantity. This is the proper grammar when counting back change.

"That's $4.95. A nickel makes five, ten, and ten is twenty."

-PJ

[PatrickHenry]

Some SF writer, Norman Spinrad maybe, wrote an article about the effects of Superman's ejaculations. Quite spectacular, as I recall.

[Poohbah]

During Mike Baron's run as writer on The Flash, he often showed the Flash chowing down mightly after a run - I'm talking 6-10 boxes of cereal, etc.

IIRC, the very short-lived television series showed the same thing.

[Poohbah]

Some SF writer, Norman Spinrad maybe, wrote an article about the effects of Superman's ejaculations. Quite spectacular, as I recall.

Larry Niven. The piece was titled "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex."

[PatrickHenry]

Thanks.

[Cboldt]

... This is the proper grammar when counting back change.

Good one. Just about any time a number is used to express a single item, distance, weight. E.g., It IS 3 miles from my house to the store. The parcel IS 10 acres in area.

[Jim Cane]

You don't have to be a superhero to fly. Just superdoooper.

Joseph of Copertino (1603-63):
This son of a poor carpenter was made a friar that became famed for prolonged suspensions in the air and high flights, often reaching the ceilings of cathedrals and the tops of trees. Seventy of his flights or levitations are officially recorded in the acts of his beatification. One of his biographers adds that this number does not count those which occurred daily at Holy Mass and generally lasted two hours.

[AdmSmith]

Nothing is really new, this is an earlier article:
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-11/p29.html

Teaching Physics with Superheroes

How did Superman get to be so strong? What killed Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy? How fast can the Flash run? Jim Kakalios, a condensed matter experimentalist and comics buff, analyzes questions like these from action comics to teach physics in a freshman seminar at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Kakalios
"Take Superman," says Kakalios. "What does it take to leap a tall building in a single bound?" To find out, Kakalios's students use Newton's laws of motion. "We calculate how much force is required," says Kakalios. That leads to the question, How did his legs get so strong? "Back in the 1930s," Kakalios says, "it was presumed that Superman was so strong because he was acclimated to Krypton's gravity." In the class, the gravitational force of Krypton--Superman's home planet--is calculated to be about 15 times that of Earth's. "We talk about Newton's law of gravity, and then we talk about how you would build such a planet, and not make it a gas giant. I bring in things from different parts of the physics curriculum, and show how interconnected everything is," says Kakalios. "It turns out that the only way we could figure out how to make such a planet, it would be very unstable--it would explode." It's an amusing twist, he adds, "that this is completely consistent with the comics."

Another example is the controversy over the death of Gwen Stacy, who was knocked off a bridge tower. Spider-Man may have been surprised to find her dead when he caught her in his web, but Kakalios's students weren't: By estimating the height of the bridge, Gwen's mass, and the time Spider-Man had to catch her, and then using conservation of momentum, says Kakalios, "it turns out the force has to be at least 10 Gs. If she experienced such a sudden jerk, it's not unreasonable that she would have broken her neck."

The Bernoulli principle, time travel, and the biological and physical feasibility and implications of shrinking to the size of an atom or growing into a giant are among the topics Kakalios's class tackles through comics. The comics don't get the science right all the time, says Kakalios, "but I am struck by how often they do." Over the years, he says, comics have kept up with the times: In the 1940s, a lot of superheroes gained their powers through some mystical artifact from the Far East; in the 1960s, they got them through radioactivity; and, since the 1990s, they get them through genetic engineering. A few years ago, adds Kakalios, results on entangled quantum states found their way into a comic book just months after they were published in Physical Review Letters.

"Interestingly," says Kakalios, "when I talk about comic-book examples, no one asks how they'll use it in real life. They never expected comics to be accurate. Once you show them it's relevant, and develop the physics, I put in real-world applications." For example, he continues, "once we've talked about the Spider-Man story line, and shown that it's conservation of momentum [that delivers the impact that kills Gwen], I bring in airbags. They increase the time to slow your head down. The force to your head can still knock you out, but it doesn't kill you."

It's a sneaky class, says Kakalios. "Basically, the course is really 'physics in the everyday world.' [Students] are so busy eating their superhero ice cream sundaes, they don't notice that I am feeding them their spinach."

Toni Feder

For a sampling of physics in comics and pop culture, see

http://www.uky.edu/projects/chemcomics Comics references to the elements are gathered in this periodic table of comic books.

http://intuitor.com/moviephysics/ The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics Web site rates the accuracy of physics in popular films.

http://www.badastronomy.com Misconceptions about astronomy from the news, movies, and elsewhere are highlighted on the Bad Astronomy Web site.

In Two-Fisted Science (G.T. Labs, 1996) and other books, Jim Ottaviani portrays scenes from the history of physics through cartoons.

http://www.msri.org/ext/larryg/ Larry Gonick pens cartoons to explain scientific concepts including special relativity and protein folding. Gonick is also coauthor of The Cartoon Guide to Physics (HarperInformation, 1991).

http://www.physics.org/Life This Web site describes at a simple level how cars, washing machines, toasters, and other everyday objects work. You'll need Micromedia Flash Player to access this Web site.

[Squawk 8888]

This is the proper grammar when counting back change.

Grammar and counting back change- two lost arts in a single sentence!

[AdmSmith]

An here are the pictures: