Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Super-strength should provide the physical capability and energy resources to at least move at super-speed.  On the surface, this would seem to limit actual reaction times to peak human ones.

However, assuming these enhanced energy resources also are augmenting the entire physiology -- as they must! -- then the energy and speed of one's neural impulses would also be stepped up.  The limit for the fastest nerve impulses without a specific super-speed power is the speed of light.

The fastest normal human nerve impulses travel at 120 metres/sec.  The fastest human running is about 10 metres/sec.  Ergo, the ratio between physical speed to neural reaction is 1:12.

If the fastest nerve impulses in a super-strong being max out at lightspeed, regardless of how infinite that strength is, then that implies that someone with super-strength can be capable of 1/12th lightspeed even without a special super-speed power.  It also means he cannot exceed that 1/12th c speed without a special super-speed power as his nerve impulses would have to violate relativity to do so.

That's how Timber Wolf of the Legion is able to move superfast without pushing the c limit like other true speedsters.  His speed is a side-effect of his super-strength which is limited to at best 1/12th lightspeed.

Yeah but the speed of light isn't a barrier anymore, at least as far as quantum physics is concerned. I mean what if the nervous system was somehow based on entaglement, which allows information to travel instantly as opposed to the limiting speed of light? I'm not saying it would be easy, or even probable, but it's not impossible.

I hear you, RedSunofKrypton.

That's why I qualified my post above by not including a specific super-speed power which the quantum entanglement would involve.

If all we're doing is boosting the energy resources available for his bodily functions, then the the ratio of nerve conduction to physical speed is 12:1 as noted above.

Barring special physical processes -- which are not included in a simple boosting of energy such as the nerve impulse energies -- 1/12th lightspeed should be the limit super-strength or other energy amplification processes would grant them.

If we include special processes like wormholes, quantum entanglment, quantum tunnelling, negative energy FTL regions, grav/anti-grav space-warp, etc. then we don't have that speed limitation.  But I consider those aspects of a true super-speed power not a side-effect of sheer super-strength.

This is an interesting topic. Unless I miss my guess the Byrned Superman was able to move at about 4 times the speed of sound. This is well below light speed which be about 260 times the speed of sound. However, in the team up with Wally West, where he chases the Flash across the world as Wally is looking for his wife, he almost keeps up with the latter. Is there a canon explanation for this such as the breathing modified courtesy Mongul's son during OWAW or is DC moving to "re-power" him to the Silver Age days?

@ Captain Kal

I wasn't thinking of the entanglement nervous system from the point of it being another power (speed based or otherwise), just an organic evolutionary enhancement to allow muscles powerful enough to go beyond 1/12 lightspeed to attain their potential. But yes, barring special enhancements like that, I agree with your calculations Captain, pretty cool :D . Oh yeah, I've just been thinking on a possible organic reason for heat vision and all I can come up with off the top of my head is bio luminescence in his irises (due to the whole color thing, infrared is a "color" afterall :P ) or retinas, any thoughts?

@ManSinha

The speed of light is about 877,606 times the speed of sound. No cannon explanation I can think of for Superman's speed increase like that, I'd just go with the Mongul's son explanation of Superman removing his mental blocks, and yes I do believe DC is putting him back to his silver age power levels. I read a quote from a writer stating the same thing a few months ago, I think it was in a Wizard magazine, not sure though.

Thank you RedSonofKrypton
Like someone else said on here, we would probably move to the "The Source" being the repository of Superman's powers. But then does he go powerless in the Marvel Universe aka the Flash?

I brought that up because there ia an interesting debate on the Tv Tome Justice League message board about JLA versus X men.

I thought the given reason was the stored energy in his body which is unleashed as heat spectra..now were you referring to the actual physics of its production?

Yup. Saying that it's stored energy that comes out of his eyes is one thing, I'm just trying to figure a workable organic mechanism for that. A type of bioluminescent chemical reaction that produces light along the infrared range and is possibly focused through nictitating lenses on the surface of his cornea is all I can think of so far.

I like Maggin's 'active mode' of Superman's super-senses esp. his sight mentioned in Superman: Miracle Monday.  I remember an old S.F. novel I read where the protagonist was artificially evolved via time travel into a future man; his senses had both a passive and active aspect as a result so his eyes could project light, illusions, or darken a room (via precisely countering the ambient light waves), and his ears could project sounds in a way similar to super-ventriloquism.

I'd like to further extrapolate that this active mode enables him to perform time symmetric reactions in his physiology.  In real life, our bodies can reverse the respiration of glucose into carbon dioxide and water by duplicating the dark cycle of photosynthesis to regenerate the glucose albeit at the expense of energy resources elsewhere in the tissues.  I'd like to think that Kryptonians can do so for a much wider variety -- maybe all of their biochemistry -- of reactions so the normal breakdown of retinal chemicals by light to trigger retinal nerve impulses could be reversed so that neural impulses from the brain are triggering the production of the corresponding photons in his eyes.  This would mean he can project anything that he can passively see.  We know this to be the case for at least heat and X-rays, and on at least one occasion -- Pre Crisis -- he's 'lengthened the wavelength' of his X-ray vision to illuminate a dark area with visible light.  Post Crisis, he's produced blinding flashes of visible light as a corollary of his heat vision on two occasions.

Given practice and skill, he should be able to go beyond random photon projections and coherent, laser-like beams to full holographic projections of completely realistic proportions.

BTW, RedSunofKrypton, I posted this thread since your Flash simulated super-powers thread triggered this for me.

I've long believed that any singular power implies a host of corollary side-effect powers.  They wouldn't only be wholly dependent on the single true super-power but they'd tend to be less versatile and/or powerful than an independent version of that same power.

So far, we've covered side-effect super-strength resulting from true super-speed in your thread, and side-effect super-speed resulting from true super-strength.  Note that the side-effect versions of these powers are not a match for the real McCoy in both instances.

Off Topic: for the sake of convenience you can call me Red or Redsun if you like :)

On topic sort of: I have a question about your "reverse chem reaction" source of heatvision, how would the output of reversing the visual chem reaction of sight be more powerful than the input version? I mean, how would he "rebuild" (as opposed to breakdown) his chemicals "more powerfully" to emit brighter light than he saw?

On Topic:
I agree with that.


So noted. :D

We are dealing with super-enhanced Kryptonian physiology here.  His reception powers of vision already amplify things to incredible levels.  It stands to reason that he could also amplify his output beyond what he passively sees.

Hey, on another level, he's already amplifying his energy levels and output far beyond what he takes in from solar power.

It all holds together consistently -- just like real science -- so that makes it that much more believable.

Note that this doesn't invoke anything really out of canon, only exploiting what's published combined with real world science and extrapolated from that. (Heat vision was an extrapolation from the original passive X-ray vision power.)

[BTW, I divide my time posting here and on this site http://s2.excoboard.com/exco/index.php?boardid=6337.  If you want comics discussions beyond just Superman related stuff, check that place out.  Either way, I'm always posting on Great Rao's site here.]

I wasn't disputing your facts, I was just curious as to how the mechanism would actually work to generate that much energy. For instance, wouldn't he need to convert a lot more "infra"-rodopsin to generate that much heat? Or is the output not based on the ammount being converted, but some other factor instead?

All I'm getting from that link is a blank page, is the server down or something?

http://s2.excoboard.com/exco/index.php?boardid=6337

Try it again above.  I just tested it.

I see what you mean.  I suppose the amount of energy generated is not proportional to the amount of chemicals involved.  Surely a gram of Kryptonian glucose doesn't yield a paltry 4.18 kcal but a transfinite amount of energy.  The very chemical bonds in Kryptonian matter are likewise amped so what was a mere 0.025 EV van der Waals bond when normal becomes something strong enough to take nukes and supernovae.

That reminds me I have to post some more corollary powers re: energy dampening for uber-levels implied. :)

Fun thread!  But, I have to take issue with the Captain's speed ratio.  The speed of a nerve impulse only affects the rate at which force is applied, it does not directly influence the organism's speed.  A hero with the required superstrength can exceed 1/12th the speed of light, even with a normal reaction time.  With sufficient strength, one "super-jump" would be all that's required to aproach the speed of light.  Repeated application of force would be unnecessary.

I wonder about that; remember even with Superstrength, there is still the air friction slowing him down. In space however, it would be closer to what you postulate. I am referencing the DC comics Presents issue with Superman and the Spectre which deals with Kara's runaway limp form after smashing into WarWorld. She was going at such speeds even unconscious that she had reached the very end of space/time, nigh the end of existence before Kal-El got to her and hence the intervention of the Spectre.

Returning to our topic of heat vision; the idea of active sensaory powers seems, well a trifle strange. I know, I know I am on a message board talking about an invulnerable being that flies  :P ; but nonetheless. I suppose one can extend Superman's control of his stapedius muscle to vibrate his ossicles, if indeed he does have ossicles to produce sound accounting for super ventriloquism.


Similarly one suppose, he could agitate the molecules in his eyes to cause energy build up which would then be emitted as heat rays.

BTW what is the explanation of Darkseid's Omega Rays? any thoughts? canon or otherwise?

Let me qualify what I meant re: peak side-effect super-speed from super-strength.

Given unlimited super-strength, he really doesn't have a peak speed given that he's been known to toss beings/objects across the time-barrier and space-warps.

But those energy resources can only accelerate his nervous system to a max of lightspeed so he can't react faster than that for his enhanced reflexes, barring true super-speed.

That's how I explain how Timber Wolf's strength and speed work.  Brin has true super-strength but his speed is a side-effect of that strength.  Similarly, Ultra Boy has been shown restraining and beating Brin with his strength alone implying that his own reflexes have also been amped by his strength as I indicated so he's not outmaneauvered by a speeding Londo.

It works now. Cool  :) .



What if yellow sunlight changes the quantum phase of a kryptonian body or kryptonian matter, to mimic the wave function phase of so called "neutronium" or other potentially indestructable materials, thereby making flesh and bone as tough as indestructible matter, but without the weight or other characteristics? This durablility would also allow for ultra strenght and speed potentials (I say potential because they'd be useless without the juice to run them) due to the correlation between muscle strength and speed being higher with durability.

Another thing about durability is that the protein structures that make up kryptonian bone and muscle could be based on carbon nano tubes, which are pound for pound 600 times stronger than steel.



I think I read somewhere that it was supposed to be psionic in nature.

Back to heatvision, would a higher triggering nerve impulse voltage mean for a more powerful photonic release and greater light or heat?

IMHO a higher triggering nerve impulse voltage could damage the nerve itself as, atleast in humans, nerve impulse voltages are based on the size of the Schwann sheath surrounding the nerve fiber. The ones with the largest sheaths conduct the quickest, ie.e the motor nerves and the enrves for fine touch whereas the nerves conducting pain impulses are smaller and are known to conduct more slowly. Arguably Kryptonian physiology could be vastly different and not subject to the same limitations

Well, two things we have to consider here.

First, we are dealing with Kryptonian tissues that not only are more hardy than Terran ones due to their harsher environment, but they have the added bonus of indestructibility conferred by our environment.

Second, recall that an electron volt or a few of them are all the photon trigger needed to set-off a retinal neural impulse.  Typical neural impulses are about a billion EV, so our own nerves typically amplify the incoming signal by a factor of up to a billion times.  It's not such a stretch to suggest that a billion times higher output is possible for an active reversed retinal reaction even for normal nerve tissue.

Cool thoughts re: quantum phases.  I suppose you're suggesting something like in-phase virtual particle fields in the EM, grav, etc. virtual fields surrounding all matter here.  Given that infinite virtual particle density, making them act in phase would render them pretty much indestructible to anything phased like that.

Another angle that could augment the above is negative mass/positive mass interactions in those same fields.  Negative mass repels positive mass but due to its negative inertial properties is still attracted to the positive mass.  The net result is the neg object scoots away while the pos one chases after it in a smoothly accelerating manner.  Properly constructed and balanced, a pos/neg mass construct would be truly immovable since a force acting on one aspect would be countered by the reaction of the other aspect.

As for the carbon nanotubes, that is a good idea and probably one implemented by the bioengineers back home on Krypton or Daxam.  Be aware that contrary to popular notions, the covalent bonds in biomatter are actually the strongest ones in nature, not the metallic ones commonly used in our machines.  If the covalent bonds in butter were properly aligned and utilized, it would be several orders of magnitude stronger than the steel knife used to cut it.  Similarly, rubber if so coherently aligned would be stronger than steel (think of a rubber band that actually tended to get stronger as it was stretched instead of the individual molecular fibres getting broken one at a time).  IOW, even without invoking nanotubes, better organization of existing molecular structures would give some pretty impressive material strengths.

BTW, that was one of my objections to Wolverton's book The Science of Superman.  He supposed heavy metal deposition to augment Kryptonian flesh when metals are actually weaker than the existing bonds so better organization of bonds makes more sense and requires no extra 'metallic absorption/deposition' concept which makes Wolverton's idea a bit ad hoc.

Not having read Wolverton's book, I don't have an opinion. However from everything that has been said and demonstrated even in our nature, it would seem like the extra metallic deposition was over and above

I agree. It seems as if adding heavier elements into physiology would add way more unneeded weight without that much of a durability/strength increase, and it could be detrimental to speed as well.



Would this be akin to reflecting kinetic energy like a mirror reflects light?

Does this mean that lights are only 1 billionth as bright as we see them, or did I misunderstand?

*Ugh!*  I messed up on the positive/negative mass business.  The positive mass scoots away and the negative one chases after it.

A mirror reflects light due to the electrons in it vibrating in phase with the incoming lightwaves.

See link:
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=00065368-3CAE-1C71-84A9809EC588EF21&catID=3&topicID=13

I was actually thinking along the lines of Newton's 'equal and opposite reaction' here.  The only thing that could disrupt a neg/pos mass construct was something acting on it faster than the reaction time of the forces within it.  So, two Earth mass equivalents of both masses parked near to each other would need to be acted upon faster than 1 G or 9.8 m/sec.  Anything acting slower than that and the system completely neutralizes the imposing force like an infinite mass object.

Re: retinal reaction to light, we don't amplify the light itself a billion times.  That's only the reaction of our neural rods to photons.  The light itself isn't being amplified,  only converted into a neurochemical impulse that's about a billion times higher than the impinging light.  Think of it like a TV cable signal booster that takes a weakening signal and amps it to get it to the next point.  Our neurons serve to amplify and conduct signals to our brains in much the the same way as transistors amplify and conduct signals in an electronic device.

But, in a sense, isn't that comparing apples to oranges, unless of course you are referring to the fact that the common denominator in both cases is electricity.

RedSun was asking if the light we see is actually a billion times dimmer than we perceive it.  Quick answer is no.  The more complete answer as to why it's 'no' is in my last post.

FYI, our own neurons are somewhat less efficient than artificial devices for energy usage.  That same switching capability is theoretically possible using only a mere 100 EV for a nanotech device instead of organic neurons which use a billion EV.  In both cases, the impinging light is the same but the signal created to send to the brain is vastly different.

So, getting back to ManSinha's original point, our neurons already can handle about a billion times the energy of the impinging photons so reversing the mechanism shouldn't burn things out.

IMHO. :)

So if humans did successfully (somehow, work with me here :)) reverse their vision to an active mode, how potentially bright would the light they released be?

It would be a max of about 23 or so watts.

Rationale:

240 million retinal neurons x max of 600 impulses/sec x 1 billion EV/impulse x 1.60219e-12 erg/EV / 1e7 (to convert ergs to joules aka watts/sec) = 23.07 watts/sec aka joules

For comparison, a typical human punch packs about 60 joules.

For a powered Kryptonian, we amp that by the strength factor.  A typical super-punch packs at least a million sun-power secs or enough to shatter the Earth.  The ratio between that and a normal punch is about 6.22e30.  Multiply that factor by the 23 watts noted above for normal humans and we get 1.43e32 watts or about 372 thousand sun-power secs for heat vision.  This conservative limit jibes with the Pre Crisis books.

the silver-age superman's heat vision was powerful enough to make stars go nova or super-nova.  and he was never shown to have used that ability at literally full power.  it took heat that was at least 3 times as powerful as his heat vision at full power to burn him.  this is why pre-crisis warworld never worked for me.  as described by starlin it came across as less powerful than superman.  it had had lasers & missiles powerful enough to destroy planets.  unless those weapons used kryptonite or magic (or one of kal's other weaknesses) they should not have been able to harm him.

So, he could have theoretically, seriously harmed an opponent like Doomsday, Pre-Crisis

Entanglement doesn't allow for information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light.  You're still dealing with particles moving at sub light speeds, which simply don't chose a state until there's already some distance between them.  Although measuring one makes the other pick a state, for all practical purposes, this is no different from the two particles chosing a state before they're separated, since the measurer isn't capable of picking the state that he wants the particle to be in.

Virtual particles arise from a particular formalism of quantum field theory which uses a perturbative expansion of path integrals, whereby the terms in the series can be described as "virtual particles" - however, "virtual particles" cease to "exist" after renormalization.

To sum things up, they're called virtual particles because there's a way of doing a series expansion where the terms kind of look like particle interactions, but even that metaphor fails to hold for physically meaningful fields.

So, I'd be hesitant to say that "in phase virtual particle fields" are responsible for anything.

A simpler picture of chemical bonding might just be to use regular old electrostatics.  Since we're dealing in QM with particles bound by potentials, we can just use coulumbs law to get a nice approximation of the energy required to break a bond.

Increasing that energy would require something like increasing the charge on the electron (impossible), moving the particles closer together (impossible, since dp*dx >= hbar), increasing the mass of the electron (also impossible, although we have things like muons - but I doubt increasing the mass would make a significant difference anyway), or adding some new kind of force (probably impossible, but I'd say there's the most room to play around here).

I say adding a new force is your best bet, because there already is a force that basically allows for indestructability - the color force, which is the force between quarks.

The color force actually increases with distance, rather than decreasing - so the harder you try to separate quarks, the harder they'll pull back together, and the more you succeed, the stronger their bond will become.  That's why you never see single quarks by themselves.



Infinite virtual particle densities always disappear during renormalization, because that's the point of renormalization.  Without it, we'd be seeing infinitely dense fields of virtual particles everywhere.



But alas, most of quantum field theory says that negative mass can't exist.



Not so - at best, it would only provide a finite force in the opposite direction of the accelleration.  The only way for it to be immovable would be if the force of gravity were infinity between the two objects, and even then, it would only be immoveable in one direction (actually, it would be flying away infinitely quickly in that direction).



That sounds interesting, but I'm too tired right now to think about it.

Good comments, Mark.

Renormalization is a mathematical slight of hand that simply substitutes the real world measured values for the theoretically predicted ones of QM.  And renormalization completely fails for gravity as it refuses to be so easily addressed.  Said virtual particle field is responsible for the inverse-square law of EM and grav forces so they can become near-infinite as a particle gets closer to another one.  Given how normal matter can be much stronger if molecular bonds are properly aligned, it's just an extrapolation that the essentially random virtual particle fields could similarly benefit from a reorganization.

Additionally, according to QM, even a piece of wet tissue paper has a vanishingly small but still non-zero probability of deflecting a cannonball.  Probability manipulation of QM effects is one way of achieving super matter effects esp. since one interpretation of QM suggests observer triggered effects (QM wave collapse) and Superman is supposed to be at least partially psionic-based in powers.

Re: pos/neg mass constructs, I did qualify in my later post that the acceleration force between the two objects would be the limiting factor, though you're right that this would be further limited by the directionality of the objects interacting.  Still, I did posit an engineered structure balancing these forces so it's more a matter of engineering than theory.  The Casimir Effect has proven the existence of at least small scale occurrences of negative mass so it's not even impossible going by real experiments.  And an interacting pos/neg mass black hole system would probably be truly immoveable given the lightspeed accelerations involved there.

from Arnold Neumaier on sci.physics.research

"Virtual particles are not considered real since they arise only in a
particular approach to high energy physics - perturbation theory
before renormalization - that does not even survive the modifications
needed to remove the infinities. Moreover, the virtual particle content
of a real state depends so much on the details of the computational
scheme (canonical or light front quantization, standard or
renormalization group enhances perturbation theory, etc.) that
calling virtual particles real produces a very weird picture of reality."

Furthermore, renormalization doesn't substitute real world predicted values for theoretical ones, rather it is used to make predicted values match real world measured ones.

Virtual particles only arise as a convenient method of solving problems in high energy physics approximately.  Alternately, you could use a matrix representation of your state vectors, or actually solve the path integrals exactly, but since these calculations can't actually be done exactly (we end up with unsolvable differential equations, a simple example of which might be the equation for pendulum motion, theta'' + g/l*sin(theta) = 0, which can only be solved with an approximation, like sin(theta) = theta, which yields theta = Acos(sqr(g/l)t) + Bsin(sqr(g/l)t)), we have to resort to approximate methods - one of which is drawing little diagrams of particles on a piece of paper, which helps our human minds to keep track of what we're doing.



Do a search for decoherence and density matrix



Negative energy, actually.  All this means is energy below the vacuum energy.  Actually having negative *mass* on the other hand, is a different story.



That system would be accellerating very rappedly in some direction.

Let me state it a different way.  Renormalization cancels out the infinities to come up with the observed values.  And QM cannot predict those observed values hence the dependence on the empirical results.  I still consider it a kind of sleight of hand since the values don't come out independently of observation.  The fact that QM does allow the interpretation of an infinite virtual particle field leads to the possibility that this field can be better organized.

As for the 'tissue paper' example, I was paraphrasing Paul Davies from his book "Other Worlds" which is about QM (that tissue paper/cannonball example was his).  It's another valid way of looking at quantum tunnelling.  An electron has a non-zero probability of being on one or the other side of a barrier even for what would be classically an impassable barrier.  Probability manipulation and the Observer influenced aspects of QM do jibe with the psionic aspect Byrne introduced to the character.

As for negative energy, energy and mass are equivalent and just different forms of the same thing.  Gravitationally and inertially we're talking about the same thing.  While traditionally, negative mass/energy has been avoided due to the problem of empty space obviously not spontaneously splitting into both types, it's being more seriously looked at now.  To stick to the tradition, they often substitute 'exotic mass' for what is really negative mass to slip this one by.

Actually, decoherence and the density matrix are related to your last sentence, not the tissue paper.



Well, yes, and no.  Mass is the norm of the energy momentum 4 vector, E^2 - p^2c^2 = m^2c^4.  So, yes, E and m are sort of equivilent, unless the particle has any momentum whatsoever.

You can give the particle an "effective mass" of E/c^2, but this only applies to momentum in the direction of motion.  F in the direction of motion is dp/dt, which ends up being proportional to gamma^3, in other words M^3/m^2, where M is the "effective" "relativistic" mass and m^2 is the "rest mass".  I've never actually seen it written that way, but I did it to avoid having to use gammas.

Force in directions other than the direction of motion, of course, is proportional to something different all together, and the gravitational force exherted by the object is related to something else.



Inertially, yes, gravitationally, no.  E and p both effect the stress energy momentum tensor, but in different ways, so for a particle where E = pc, like a photon doesn't produce the same gravitational effects as a particle of mass E/mc^2.

To ask a simple question: Given the relatively complex physics involved, is there a possibility that when Superman takes off extremely rapidly or is flying (Pre Crisis) at ultra light speeds, that he can exert a pull on the planet or is the mass differential too much?