Superhero Physics!

In my wanderings around the web this morning, I happened to come across an article by Torsten Ove:

'Physics for Superheroes': perfect for science-challenged dads

Ove starts his article with this rumination:

Being a sober, serious-minded journalist interested in the critical issues of the day, I've long wondered: How the heck does Cyclops of the X-Men fire those eye beams of his without snapping his neck like a matchstick?

Now I've got my answer -- he can't.

The article is a book review for The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios. Being both a comic book fan and an honest-to-goodness college-educated science geek, I had to take a look. And it looks good. One more for my holiday wish list.

Here are the other tidbits mentioned by the article:

» The Flash would have to eat 150 million hamburgers to run as fast as he does. If he stopped running, he'd have to eat another 150 million just to get started again.

» But Flash really could run on water. At such high speeds the water would act like a solid because its molecules can't move out from under his feet fast enough for him to sink before he's gone.

» Superman could leap tall buildings in a single bound. But he couldn't lift up a building or a ship. Oh, he's strong enough, but buildings and ships aren't -- they would crumble under their own weight.

» So would Henry Pym, aka Giant-Man. Even if he could grow to huge heights, he couldn't do much, because his spine would snap under the strain of his weight.

» Angel, the X-Man with big wings on his back, couldn't fly unless he had freakishly huge chest muscles. The guy in the movies and comic books is way too skinny.

» And Spider-Man? Could he jump prodigious distances because of his "proportional strength of a spider?" No....But he could swing from buildings on a thread, and his webbing would be strong enough to stop a jet fighter landing on an aircraft carrier.

But lest we conclude that all comic book science is junk science, consider the following statement from the back of the book in question:

"Surprisingly enough, according to Kakalios, comic books get their physics right more often than you’d think." —The Boston Globe

I've definitely got to read that book.