The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition

by Kakalios, James

  Similarly, my physics colleagues are warned that this book is for a nonexpert audience. I have attempted to keep things simple, while acknowledging the rough edges and complications of the real world. A complete discussion of many of the topics considered here could easily expand to fill several volumes and would provide a concrete illustration of Dr. Manhattan’s final words at the conclusion of Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen: “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”

  The language that describes the physical world is mathematical in nature. Why this should be so is a deep, philosophical question (the physicist Eugene Wigner referred to the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in accounting for nature’s properties) that has puzzled and stirred all those who have studied it. It is tempting, in a book involving comic-book superheroes, to avoid even the slightest whiff of mathematics. However, that would be a cheat, worse than omitting any reproductions of artwork in a book about Picasso, or not providing a CD of recordings for a book about the history of jazz, because mathematics is necessary in any thorough discussion of physics.

  The reader may protest that they do not understand math, or cannot think mathematically. But for this book, all that is required is that one recognizes that ½ + ½ = 1. That’s it, that two halves equal a whole. If you are comfortable with ½ + ½ = 1, then writing it as 2 × (½) == 1 (that is, two multiplied by one half) should cause no concern, because obviously two halves equal one. It seems so simple that you may be surprised to discover that we have already been doing algebra (and you thought you’d never use that again after high school!).

  As many students have long suspected, there is a trick to algebra, and the trick is the following: If one has an equation describing a true statement, such as 1 = 1, then one can add, subtract, multiply, or divide (excepting division by zero) the equation by any number we wish, and as long as we do it to both the left and right sides of the equation, the correctness of the equation is unchanged. So if we add 2 to both sides of 1 = 1, we obtain 1 + 2 = 1 + 2 or 3 = 3, which is still a true statement. Dividing both sides of 1 = 1 by 2 gives us ½ = ½. Since 1 = 1, then ½ + ½ = 1, which in turn can be written as= 1. I’ll make a deal with you, Fearless Reader: I won’t use any mathematics more sophisticated than what’s described in this paragraph if you’ll refrain from panicking when a mathematical equation appears. You can always glide right by the math, and your understanding will be no worse for it. But if you take a notion to calculate a velocity or a force for a situation other than considered here, you’ll have the tools to do so. In any event, I promise you that there will be no quizzes at the end of the book!

  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

  IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, as the writing of my physics dissertation neared completion, my thesis adviser impressed upon me that no scientific research is ever “finished.” Regardless of the answers you have obtained to your problem, there are always at least a few open questions—loose threads waiting to be pulled. Having written The Physics of Superheroes, I have discovered that, similarly, no book is ever finished. The manuscript is delivered to the editor, galley proofs are checked (though the typographical errors that inevitably slip through are guaranteed to be the first thing the proud author spots upon cracking open the newly published book), the book shows up on the shelves of bookstores, and yet threads remain loose. There is always more that could be said, or said better.

  Consequently, I was pleased when Gotham Books offered me the opportunity to revise Superheroes for a second edition. The feedback I received from readers on the 2005 first edition suggested many topics that warranted additional attention. My estimation of the time Superman would spend pushing his weight down against the ground as he prepared to leap a tall building in a single bound in particular provoked many friendly discussions with readers, and I am happy to have a chance to elaborate on this point in this second edition.

  Additionally, soon after publication, I came across superhero illustrations of various physics principles that, had I been aware of earlier, I certainly would have included. This second edition also includes new chapters on fluid mechanics, angular momentum, and materials science, as reflected in discussions of the heroes and villains Aquaman, the Top, and Whirlwind; and the entire Justice League of America and Avengers, respectively. Some chapters in the Mechanics section have been reordered, in order to improve the flow of the topics discussed. Every chapter has been edited, some extensively. Moreover, mathematical analysis indicates that in this second edition, the jokes are now 12.7 percent cornier, in some cases by the utilization of the anti ”rule of three” (two punch lines followed by a straight line). I hope that you will find this second edition to be a fun and accessible way to learn the basic principles of physics.

  In addition to all of those I thanked in the first edition, there are a few new names whose assistance with the second edition I wish to acknowledge. Patrick Mulligan at Gotham Books has been a wonderful and insightful editor of this edition. I am proud to thank my son Thomas for his careful reading of the new chapters and his suggestions for improvement and clarification. Laura Gjo vaag, who runs The Unofficial Aquaman website, and Rob Kelly at The Aquaman Shrine website, were both great resources for all things Aquaman-related and provided indispensable information and images of the Aquatic Ace. I appreciate their generous time and effort. Once again, Jenny Allen’s assistance preparing the new figures for the second edition is greatly appreciated.

  INTRODUCTION

  SECRET ORIGINS: HOW SCIENCE SAVED SUPERHERO COMIC BOOKS

  IF I HAD EVER WONDERED whether or not my students found studying physics to be a waste of time, all doubt was removed several years ago. I was returning from lunch to the physics building at my university when I overheard two students as they were leaving. From their expressions and the snippet of conversation I caught, it seemed that they had just had a graded exam returned to them. I’ll quote here what I heard (but in the interest of decorum, I’ll clean it up).

  The taller student complained to his friend, “I’m going to bleeping buy low, and bleeping sell high. I don’t need to know about no bleeping balls thrown off no bleeping cliffs.”

  There are three nuggets of wisdom contained in this statement: (1) the secret to financial success; (2) as scholars of English grammar can attest, “bleeping” can be both an adjective and an adverb; and (3) that the examples used in traditional physics classes strike many students as divorced from their everyday concerns.

  The real world is a complicated place. In order to provide illustrations in a physics lesson that emphasize only a single concept, such as Newton’s Second Law of Motion or the principle of Conservation of Energy, physics teachers have developed over the decades an arsenal of overly stylized scenarios involving projectile motion, weights on pulleys, or oscillating masses on springs. These situations seem so artificial that students inevitably lament, “When am I ever going to use this stuff in my real life?”

  One trick I’ve hit upon in teaching physics involves using examples culled from superhero comic books that correctly illustrate various applications of physics principles. Interestingly enough, whenever I cite examples from superhero comic books in a lecture, my students never wonder when they will use this information in their “real life.” Apparently they all have plans, post-graduation, that involve protecting the City from all threats while wearing spandex. As a law-abiding citizen, this notion fills me with a great sense of security, knowing as I do how many of my scientist colleagues could charitably be termed “mad.”

  I first made the connection between comic books and college education back in 1965, when for the princely sum of twelve cents I purchased Action Comics # 333, which featured the adventures of Superman. While not a huge fan of the Man of Steel at the time, I was seduced by the comic’s cover (see fig. 1), which promised a glimpse into the inner workings of our institutions of higher learning. As a kid I was deeply curious as to what college life would be like. Now that I am a university professor, I realize that this was a
premonition that once I entered college I would never get out, and that my matriculation would turn into some sort of life sentence.

  A story in Action # 333, titled “Superman’s Super Boo-Boos,” featured a scene in which, as a “tribute to all he’s done for humanity,” Superman was to be granted an “honorary degree of Doctor of Super-Science” by Metropolis Engineering College. (I should point out that such a degree option was not offered when I enrolled in graduate school.) On the cover of this issue, Superman was in a large auditorium on a college campus and was “writing” his name on a bronze honor scroll using his heat vision. The aged faculty in attendance, wearing commencement dress, were aghast, not due to the fact that searing beams of energy were emanating from Superman’s eyes but rather because the professors saw a fire-breathing dragon up on the stage instead of Superman, due to an illusion cast by Superman’s archnemesis, Lex Luthor. This was part of Luthor’s scheme to constantly confound Superman’s expectations until he was paralyzed by indecision and hence unable to stop Luthor’s evil schemes.1 Even as a grade-school kid, I realized that this depiction of college life was probably not too realistic. Nevertheless, the cover did provide two insights that, in the fullness of time, have turned out to be fairly accurate. The first is that all college professors, at all times, always wear caps and gowns. The second is that all college professors are eight-h undred-year-old white men.

  Fig. 1. Cover to Action Comics # 333, featuring a scene from Superman’s ill-fated visit to Metropolis Engineering College.

  While this may have been my first indication that comic books and college could coexist, it would not be my last. Over the years, I have continued to enjoy reading and collecting comic books. (This is not a “guilty pleasure” of mine, simply because I don’t believe in “guilty” pleasures. Snobbery is just the public face of insecurity.) And in my reading I’ve noted that the writers and artists creating superhero comic-book stories get their science right more times than you might expect. Those not overly familiar with superhero comic books may be surprised to learn that anything in comic books could be scientifically correct, and one can learn a lot of science from reading comic books.

  A typical example is shown in fig. 2, featuring a scene from World’s Finest # 93, from April 1958. The big superstars at National Comics (which later became Detective Comics and is today known as DC Comics) are Superman, Batman, and Robin and each issue of World’s Finest contained a team-up adventure of the Man of Steel and the Dynamic Duo. In this story, a crook, Victor Danning, has his intelligence accidentally increased to “genius level” during a botched attempt to steal a “brain amplifier” machine. Using his enhanced mental powers, he proceeds to commit a series of “super-crimes,” drawing the attention of Batman and Robin and Superman. After several of his schemes are nar-rowly foiled by our heroes, Danning decides to take a proactive approach and attempts to discover the hidden headquarters of Batman and Robin, the Batcave. (It’s not really explained how this would defeat Batman and Robin, and it is presented as a given that if you are a crook, you want to learn the Batcave’s address.)

  Fig. 2. A scene from World’s Finest # 93. In this scene, a crook whose intelligence has been artificially enhanced describes his plan to utilize the dispersion of underground shock waves in order to determine the hidden location of the Batcave.

  Danning instructs his henchmen to plant sticks of dynamite along the perimeter of Gotham City. Monitoring the resulting shock waves on his “radar seismograph,” Danning explains that the waves traveling through a cave will have different speeds than those moving through solid rock, and in this way the location of the Batcave can be discerned.

  In this example, the evil genius Victor Danning is on solid scientific ground, for it is indeed true that the velocity of sound or a shock wave will depend on the density of the material through which it moves. Sound waves need a medium in which to propagate. In a dilute medium, such as air, there are large spaces between molecules, which makes it harder for pressure waves to propagate, compared with water, steel, or the thin walls of an apartment. Roughly speaking, the denser the medium, the faster the sound travels, which is why in old Western movies a character would put his ears to the railroad tracks to determine whether a train, too distant to see, was approaching. He could hear the train’s vibrations through the steel rail much sooner than if he waited for the same noise to reach him through the air. Indeed, geologists make use of this variation of the speed of sound waves in order to locate underground pockets of oil or natural gas. The depiction in comic books of actual scientists and how they work, on the other hand, often leaves much to be desired. In the very same issue of World’s Finest, as shown in fig. 3., the inventor of the “brain amplifier,” Dr. John Carr, describes his latest experiment at a scientific conference. He boasts that his device will “increase any man’s mental power 100 times.” Unfortunately, Carr points out that there’s one catch, saying: “There’s one ingredient that’s still missing [before his machine will work], and I haven’t found out yet what it is!” This is equivalent to inventing a machine that turns lead into gold, or tap water into gasoline—but needs one key element (and who knows if it even exists) to work! Rarely are presentations made at physics conferences of work in such an unfinished state (at least not intentionally). Watching this presentation is Victor Danning (this is where he was inspired to steal the brain amplifier, despite its intrinsic design flaw), who is labeled in the caption box as a “crooked ex-scientist.” This part rings true, for I speak not just as a physicist but for all scientists when I say that once you become “crooked,” we kick you out of the club and strip you of your “scientist” title, ripping the epaulets off your lab coat and tossing you to the curb.

  Fig. 3. Another scene from World’s Finest # 93, where “crooked ex-scientist” Victor Danning first learns of the “brain amplifier” device, along with its only drawback.

  The incorporation of scientific principles into superhero adventures is only occasionally found in stories from the 1940s (referred to by fans as the “Golden Age” of comic books) but is much more common in comics from the late 1950s and 1960s (known as the “Silver Age”). Between these two epochs lies the “Dark Age” of comic books, when sales plummeted and the very concept of superheroes came under attack by psychiatrists, educators, and congressmen. Those circumstances that led to the existence of two “ages” of superhero comic books are also responsible, it can be argued, for the “scientific” tone in Silver Age comics published in the post-Sputnik era. Since we will be relying on superheroes to illustrate scientific concepts for the rest of this book, it is useful to first take a moment to consider the early roots of these mystery men.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF SUPERHERO COMIC BOOKS

  Before there were comic books, there were comic strips.2 Weekly broadsheets in Victorian England, nicknamed “penny dreadfuls,” featured humorous strips in the music-h all tradition. Their popularity with poor workers was a great offense to middle-class sensibilities. A fierce newspaper rivalry in the 1890s between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst spurred the creation of the newspaper comic strips that proved extremely popular with newly arrived immigrants who were only semi-conversant in English. These newspaper strips became highly effective weapons in the circulation wars of the time. In fact, it is claimed that the association of Hearst papers with Richard F. Outcault’s visually striking and popular comic strip character, the Yellow Kid, who even appeared on editorial pages, inspired critics of sensationalistic newspapers to denigrate them with the sobriquet “yellow journalism.”

  Despite occasional forays into presenting comic strips in a magazine format (such as a Buster Brown comic book published in 1903, Little Nemo in 1906, and Mutt and Jeff in 1910), comic books did not become firmly established until 1933. At the time, newsstands were filled with extremely popular pulp magazines, which contained an entire original novel for just ten cents. Costs were kept down, in part, by printing on the poor-quality paper that gave these journals their nam
e. There were popular titles devoted to mystery stories, such as Detective Fiction Weekly and Black Mask (which first published Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler); science fiction, such as Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories (wherein Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury got their start); horror and fantasy, such as Unknown and Weird Tales (the home of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and even the playwright Tennessee Williams); and action/adventure titles like The Shadow, The Spider, G-8 and His Battle Aces, The Mysterious Wu Fang, and Doc Savage. At the height of their popularity, some pulp titles sold several hundred thousand issues per month, which even at ten cents a copy was big money during the Depression. In this highly competitive environment, George Janosik, George Delacorte, Harry Wildenberg, and Maxwell C. Gaines (a schoolteacher before he became a comic-book publisher) decided to take a chance and reprint the color newspaper comic strips from the Sunday supplements onto standard tabloid-size sheets of newsprint, folding them into a 6 ⅝“ × 10 ⅛” pamphlet (thereby establishing the standard format for comic books, which remains unchanged to this day). The comic book Funnies on Parade was distributed with coupons for Procter & Gamble products and similar promotional giveaways, and the popularity of the first print run of 10,000 copies inspired them to stick a ten-cents price tag on another issue and sell them on newsstands. The speed with which these newsstand comics sold out (despite the fact that they contained only reprints of material that had been previously available in Sunday newspapers) demonstrated that there was a future in these “funny books.”

  Newspaper comic strips were leased to regional papers through “distribution syndicates,” which controlled the reprint rights to these strips. In order to satisfy the demand for material by comic-book publishers who couldn’t secure (or didn’t want to pay for) reprint rights for newspaper strips, Maj. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson hired a group of work-hungry young artists and writers and commissioned original comic material. These brand-new stories were published as New Fun Comics by National Allied Publications. The drawn, inked, lettered, and ready for-printing comic pages that came out of Wheeler-Nicholson’s studio enabled the publishers to avoid the high rates charged by the then-powerful typesetters unions. Soon, the stories that had occupied the pulp-fiction magazines were being told in graphic form, and comics featuring detective and police stories, horror, funny animals and straight gags, adventure heroes, secret agents, and crime fighters with mystical powers filled the newsstands. These ranks were joined in 1938 by a strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.