The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition (67 page)

Hence, an effective anti-Green Lantern weapon, regardless of the period, would be a yellow, wooden baseball bat.

The accumulated body of knowledge about the world is now so vast that physicists are able to make continued progress only by specializing in either experimental or theoretical research. Experimentalists work in laboratories and carry out measurements, while theoreticians perform calculations and computer simulations. I am an experimentalist, while Stephen Hawking is a theorist (the differences begin there). One of the last physicists who truly excelled at both experimental and theoretical research was Enrico Fermi.

As a father myself, I can certainly empathize with Jor-El. Many are the times I’ve been tempted to put my own kids in a rocket ship and send them off into deep space.

Superman first flew in his cartoon adventures, animated by the Fleischer Studios and then Famous Studios from 1941 to 1943. It took too long and was too costly to animate Superman constantly crouching and leaping, and the animators petitioned to allow Superman to just fly. Slowly and somewhat inconsistently, this power migrated over to the comic book adventures of the Man of Tomorrow.

This last power was introduced to explain why only a simple pair of eyeglasses created such a perfect disguise that no one ever realized that mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent and the world-famous Superman were the same person. As described in
Superman # 330,
Superman apparently subconsciously hypnotizes everyone who sees him into believing that his face is markedly different from Clark Kent’s.

How a radioactive element from his native planet would affect Superman so strongly, while he remained immune to radioactive isotopes found on Earth, is more an issue of contract negotiations than physical plausibility. Kryptonite was first introduced in the radio serial
Adventures of Superman
in 1943, or so the story goes, when the overworked radio actor portraying the Man of Steel wanted a vacation. The radio scriptwriters created Superman’s mineral nemesis so that another actor could portray the stricken superhero by groaning into the microphone. Several years later, the comic-book writers adopted and adapted this creative device, and a rainbow of Kryptonite (green, red, gold, silver, and others) with a broad range of effects on Superman was introduced into the comic-book universe.

You never forget your first car!

The Hulk is brighter than everyone gives him credit for (his alter ego is a physicist, after all).

Experts will argue, correctly, that this value for the time spent pushing against the ground is too long, and should be at least ten times smaller. We will address this point in the next chapter. Have patience, Fearless Reader!

This is the unbalanced force across the diameter of a planet arising from one side being closer to the sun than the other.

Those who were involved in publishing DC and Marvel comics at the time deny that such a golf game ever took place. Nevertheless, because this story is considered the fountainhead of Marvel Comics by so many fans, it has become the accepted legend, regardless of whether it has any factual basis.

In the 2002 motion picture
Spider-Man,
the genetically engineered superspider bite also gave Peter the ability to shoot organic webbing from ducts in his wrists. This freed the filmmakers from having to explain why teenager Peter Parker was able to invent and manufacture a revolutionary adhesive webbing, yet persistently remained in debt.

Though the bridge as drawn is clearly the Brooklyn Bridge, it is identified in the story as the George Washington Bridge. In 2004 the editor of this issue, Stan Lee, accepted responsibility (it comes with great power, after all) for the error. In subsequent reprints the bridge is referred to as the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Flash!

A freak electrochemical accident of this nature would never be seen again—until
Flash Comics # 110,
when another lightning bolt splashed young Wally West with identical chemicals, endowing him with superspeed as well. Wally then began his career as a junior crimefighter, under the imaginative name Kid Flash.

There are important exceptions to this general principle that viscosity increases with speed, such as with tomato ketchup. When rapidly stressed, the viscosity of ketchup decreases, while as just argued, a sharp shock to water increases its resistance to flow. This is why fast, hard raps to the bottom of a ketchup bottle momentarily reduce its viscosity and speed up its egress from the bottle.

This “negative energy” is associated with squeezed quantum states, and is beyond the scope of this book. And no, your brother in-law cannot be considered a vast, untapped source of negative energy.

He rarely made use of this ability. Noteworthy is
More Fun Comics # 106
, where a darkly inked page invites the reader to “look at things not through Aquaman’s dark-adapted eyes, but through our own. On the ocean floor, all is blackness. But here and there, quivering, gleaming streaks of phosphorescence knife through the gloom. . . .”

It’s pronounced Sub-Mariner, not Submarine-er, by the way. Prince Namor’s creator, Bill Everett, joined the merchant marines at age fifteen (and left two years after) and presumably was very familiar with this synonym for seamen. His half-human/ half-Atlantean hero, capable of breathing underwater, is best described as a
sub
merged
mariner
. Imperius Rex!

A long, typically carbon-based molecule is called a “polymer” because it contains many (poly) similar chemical structures (called “mers” from the Greek “meros” meaning “part”) along its chain.

Sorry.

In a 2008 issue of the
JLA Classified,
the Atom, a size-reducing superhero in the DC comic universe, is shown deliberately increasing his size when he must walk across a room, in order to increase his stride and reduce the number of steps he must take. Ant Man had only one size he could shrink to, and consequently employed ants as transportation.

When concerned about fracturing or tearing a surface, we must consider the force and the area over which it is applied. When attempting to cross a barely frozen lake that has only a very thin layer of ice on its surface, you are more likely to successfully get across wearing snowshoes than stiletto high heels. Your weight is the same regardless of footwear, but the higher pressure in the high heels will lead to an icy dunking.

What?

Flash Fact: An object will escape the Earth’s gravitational field if launched with a speed of seven miles a second!

Sorry.

Only in Silver Age comic books would a serious criminal go by the name “Toughy.”

The periodic harmonic motion of a swinging pendulum is one of the cor nerstones of much of the theoretical modeling one does in physics. When attempting to describe some complicated natural phenomenon, we so often begin by invoking a simple pendulum that one is tempted to paraphrase Yogi Berra and state that 90 percent of physics is “simple harmonic motion” and the other half is the “random walk.”

We’ll have more to say about the Atom and his shrinking ability in Chapter 13.

The intensity of the pressure wave from a sonic boom decreases with distance from the source. Consequently, as long as a supersonic jet stays well above street level, a similar concern over building damage can be avoided.

The flash of lightning originating from the thunderhead covers a distance of one mile in roughly five millionths of a second (we are physiologically unable to detect events happening that quickly; for us it is instantaneous), while the sound of thunder that is created simultaneously takes nearly five seconds to reach us. Counting the number of seconds between the two events, and making use of the fact that sound takes five seconds to cover one mile, allows us to easily calculate the distance of the thunderstorm from us.

In 1997 scientists were able to directly verify that a sufficiently large energy density could cause matter to spontaneously come into existence. By colliding high-energy gamma ray photons of light together, they were able to create electron/anti-electron particle pairs in the laboratory, in essence re-creating the mechanisms operating in the first seconds of the universe.

It turns out that we could have started our discussion in Chapter 1 with a definition of energy and, using the Rule of Algebra, worked backward to “derive” the expression
F
=
ma
, instead of starting with
F
=
ma
and determining the expression for energy as we did. Where one starts in the calculation is a matter of personal taste. In the end we will always find the expression for Gwen Stacy of v
²
= 2gh. This connection between her final velocity and the height from which she falls is the important thing, and Gwen does not really care which equations one uses to obtain it.

Wally was originally Kid Flash, but by 1985 he had dropped the “kid” portion of his title, taking over the mantle of the Flash after Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, had died saving our universe from the Anti Monitor. It’s a long story.

Note that kg-meter
²
/sec
²
is also the unit for gravitational potential energy PE = mgh, when kg, meter/sec
²
, and meters are used for mass m, acceleration due to gravity g, and height h, respectively. This is reassuring, for if kinetic energy is equivalent to potential energy, they should be measured with the same units. Something would be very wrong with our analysis if kinetic energy had units of kg-meter
²
/sec
²
and potential energy or Work had units of sec
³
/kg or something equally strange.

Since roughly half of our caloric intake goes toward maintaining metabolic functions, the Flash would likely need to eat twice the amount we have estimated.

That much gas, by the way, would weigh more than 560 tons—making
Archie’s
gas tank the heaviest thing on the ship.

Not all meteors burn upon entering the atmosphere, however. In order to account for the large quantity of Kryptonite that managed to reach Earth intact, it was argued in
Superman # 130
that remnants of his planet’s destruction possessed an invulnerability to air friction!

As John Carr (fig. 3) and Ray Palmer illustrate, in comic books, scientists tend to construct miraculous devices and leave an open space for the “key missing ingredient” that will make the mechanism operational.

Since Ant Man shrinks at constant density, the force of his punch diminishes at the same rate as the cross-sectional area of his biceps. His punches pack an impressive pressure only because the surface area of his fist decreases along with the force supplied by his muscles.

Years later Wanda’s mutant power was associated with “chaos magic,” but this is just silly. No less an authority than Dr. Strange (the Sorcerer Supreme of the Marvel universe) has stated (
Avengers # 503
) that there is no such thing as “chaos magic.”

So what is he breathing? Stay tuned for the answer, Fearless Reader!

Lee had originally wanted to call the series
The Mutants
, but his boss, Martin Goodman, thought the term too obscure for a comic book title.

Later to be known as
The Uncanny X- Men.

Cosmic rays?

The “shrapnel” reference will make sense in Chapter 24, when we discuss in depth Iron Man’s origins. Stay tuned, Fearless Reader!

While the thermally driven chemical and structural changes during cooking can be quite complex, for our purposes the key step will be approximated as a melting transition.

By vibrating back and forth at high speed, the Flash imparts kinetic energy to the ice crystals surrounding him. A vibration rate back and forth of 100,000 times per second, even if he could only flex half an inch, would correspond to a total kinetic energy (½) mv
²
of 35 million kg-meter
²
/sec
²
. The melting transition of ice to water requires the addition of 336 kg meter
²
/sec
²
per gram of ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. With his excess kinetic energy, the Flash is able to melt a hundred kilograms of ice around him, freeing him to return Captain Cold to the Central City Jail.

I cannot stress enough that, nearly without exception, one cannot randomly combine a collection of circuitry and power supplies into a box and “accidentally discover” that it is a fully functioning death ray (believe me-I’ve tried!).

These four forces, in the form of the villains Graviton, Zzzax, Quantum, and Halflife, can be quite formidable when combined, as the West Coast Avengers found in “The Unified Field Theory.”

Young readers during the Silver Age could be forgiven if they reached the conclusion that being struck by lightning, preferably in conjunction with some other hazardous activity, was one of the best things that could happen to them, second only to being exposed to massive doses of radiation.