The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition (3 page)

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.