The
Uncanny Physics of Superhero Comic Books
While it is not quite true that one can learn physics
from superhero comic books, it is the motivation for a Freshman Seminar class I
teach at the University of Minnesota entitled: "Everything I Know About
Science I Learned from Reading Comic Books". In this talk I will describe
some of the examples from the four-color pages of comic books, along with
recent Hollywood movies, used in this class to illustrate basic physical
principles such as forces and motion, conservation of energy, electricity and
magnetism and elementary quantum mechanics. For example, have you ever wondered
how strong you would have to be to "leap a tall building in a single
bound?" If you could run as fast as the Flash, could you run up the side
of a building or across the ocean, and more importantly, how frequently would
you need to eat? If Spider-Man's webbing is as strong as real spider's silk,
could it support his weight as he swings between buildings? At the end of the
class, the students have learned the underlying physics behind how automobile
airbags save lives, how airplanes fly, how radar guns measure a car's speed and
how all the elements in the universe were formed. The students, ranging from
engineering to history majors, were not all comic book fans, but they all found
the course to be an entertaining and pain-free way to learn critical thinking
and the fundamentals of physics. Whether done deliberately to appear
"educational" or simply as a habit on the part of the writers who
used to work on science fiction pulp magazines, superhero comic books often get
their science right more often than one would expect.