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Ahhh, this is an awesome thread so far. Larry Niven's always been one of my favorite authors, and I read "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" ages ago. He does other fun little essays regarding the principles of time travel and teleportation. Both are great reads (though obviously not as tongue in cheek as the Superman one).

Incidentally, I believe Larry Niven was a MAJOR Green Lantern fan, and contributed heavily to his writing during a fairly long stretch of the series. Don't ask me for details, but I do believe it was in the latter Hal Jordan days. If anyone can fill in the gaps on that, I'd love to hear more details.

As for the physics... one BIG question I always had when I was a little kid was this: the original Flash (Barry Allen) was constantly running through walls. Haven't seen Wally West do that lately, but anyways. It was explained that what he did was vibrate his molecules so fast that he could basically pass through solid matter. I wanted to know if that was possible (of course assuming the capability of vibrating molecules that fast).

The answer was a qualified yes. Theoretically, yes, you could vibrate your molecules fast enough that the bonds holding your molecules together would fall apart, and assuming they had enough forward inertia to keep them moving, your molecules would pass through the wall easily. The problem would be reassembling yourself on the other side ;)

Qwinn

Oh, another note of interest to Superman fans.

Did you ever wonder why Lois Lane (and everyone else for that matter) was so incredibly stupid that they couldn't figure out that Clark Kent was Superman?

Here was the explanation that was given at one point in time.

Just as Superman's costume was woven from his baby blankets (yes, I know, pre-1985), so were Clark Kent's glasses made from the glass of his ship. Apparently, Superman has a very low-level Hypnosis power. Normally, it doesn't do much at all. But totally unbeknownst to him for a long time, the Kryptonian glass of his glasses magnified that low level hypnosis, and people saw him as he semi-consciously -wanted- to be perceived, which was thin and rather frail. This led, on one occassion, to Lois Lane catching Clark undressing (but still wearing his glasses), and she cracks up at how ridiculous he looks half dressed as Superman.

Pretty clever way to deal with the fact that until then we had little other alternative but to believe that most of his best friends were complete idiots for not figuring out who he was.

(This is from pre-crisis, btw, so don't know how it would jibe with the current explanation of his powers)

BTW - I was actually unaware of the current "force field" explanation for his powers. Is this still tied to the yellow sun, and is the sun still also responsible for heat vision, etc?

Qwinn

> As for the physics... one BIG question I always had when I was a little kid was this: the original Flash (Barry Allen) was constantly running through walls. Haven't seen Wally West do that lately, but anyways. It was explained that what he did was vibrate his molecules so fast that he could basically pass through solid matter. I wanted to know if that was possible (of course assuming the capability of vibrating molecules that fast).
>
> The answer was a qualified yes. Theoretically, yes, you could vibrate your molecules fast enough that the bonds holding your molecules together would fall apart, and assuming they had enough forward inertia to keep them moving, your molecules would pass through the wall easily. The problem would be reassembling yourself on the other side ;)

That's the part I wonder about: how he'd manage to maintain the molecular bonds in the process of vibrating. I guess if I were the writer I might try to explain that by invoking a psychic pk field that allows his subconscious to mentally maintain the molecular bonds. Also maybe he only "unbonds" certain parts of his body at one time so he's not totally disintegrated at any given time, just part of his body is. Or he might pass through an alternate time-stream where the object he's passing through doesn't exist, which would amount to a type of interdimensional teleportation, so it only *appears* he's passing through the object in our time-stream.