Physics of Superheroes

[TELLE]

Anyone read this new book?  Comments?

http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2005/09/28/65328

The link is to an article by the physics prof who wrote the Physics of Superheroes.  Contains lots of Superman physics (some of it was exerpted in last month's Wired magazine).

[RedSunOfKrypton]

Haha I like that.

[nightwing]

It does sound interesting, and it confirms what most of us thought: Spidey killed Gwen.

[RedSunOfKrypton]

Well...it's not cannon.

Besides Spidey's web is really elastic, it wouldn't just have stopped Gwen cold.  

[Uncle Mxy]

It really depends on how stretchy Spidey's web is as it's fired, which has varied dramatically when drama was called for.  What further muddies matters is that Peter had a cold right as this was going on, making note that his reflexes were a little off.  There's plenty of wiggle room.  

Gwen Stacy's "<snap>" is the same thing as the "jounced the limb" moment from Knowles' "A Separate Peace".  I got an A on a high school paper that mentioned this (even thought I got an "obscure reference?" note in red from my teacher for mentioning Spidey as an example ).

As applied to Superman, what amuses me is that folks reject Byrne's pseudo physics pertaining to Superman's bio-aura, even though it goes a long way toward explaining how he can semi-realistically lift battleships -and- keeps the garment industry alive replacing tattered capes.

[Captain Kal]

Superman would need a variant of the aura to explain how he stopped Lois from going splat on the sidewalk in BR after Lex tossed her out the window.  Being stopped that abruptly by the sidewalk or Superman at that point would be fatal, if some other mechanism wasn't at work.

But Luthor does speculate that Superman has Wolverton's anti-gravity neural network so maybe that's what was working here.

[Uncle Mxy]

The scene everyone knows is Superman and Lois flying together in Superman I, with Lois being held totally improbably.  Of course, I suspect many of us don't pay too much attention to that moment because we're finding the mute button to turn off Margot Kidder's internal monologue.

[Captain Kal]

For the record, Gresh & Weinberg chose an impossible 1000 Gs for Krypton's gravity that would be impossible to create a normal matter planet from.

The fact that actual scientific speculation coupled with BR canon tells the gravity is a more realistic 35 Gs or so -- which is possible for a normal matter planet with a brown dwarf mass, 0.253 of the sun's radius -- which gives a realistic density of only 1.27 x Earth's.

As I said elsewhere, their objective was to say it wasn't possible and even went so far as to fudge things a bit to ensure they reached their preconceived conclusion.

The realistic figure makes Action Comics #1 levels achievable.  Current thought and research on genetic muscular enchancements and materials strength limits can push these limits higher, perhaps to the mountain or asteroid moving levels of the early Byrned Superman.

Esoteric, theoretical physics allows the possibility of the uber-levels of the Pre Crisis model.