Math-Man! ~Super-Heroic physics n' such

physic's is the art of Math! I love it thanks bunches this is great

The beginning o' this for those not DALLAS NEWS members -

[ By day, James Kakalios is, by his own description, “a mild-mannered scientist at a large Midwestern university.”

In his off hours, he is incapable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound. But he can tell you how it could be done.

“Basically, if Superman used his feet to apply 6,000 pounds of force on the sidewalk, he would accelerate to about 140 miles an hour, which would propel him about, say, an eighth of a mile, which would allow him to clear a 30- to 40-story building,” he said.

On Sunday, in Dallas, Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota, performed another amazing feat.

He kept an audience of about 200 teen- and middle-age comic book fans fascinated as he delivered a lecture that touched on such topics as tensile strength, quantum mechanics, Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and the relationship between mass and density.

Kakalios’ lecture, “Physics and Materials Science of Superheroes,” was the opening public event in a weeklong meeting of the 112-year-old American Physical Society.

About 7,500 members of the 48,000 member organization, the largest in the world devoted to the discussion and dissemination of physics, are expected to attend the conference at the Dallas Convention Center.

Some 7,000 scientific papers will be presented between now and Friday evening, most with titles such as “Qubits in a Semiconducting Nanowire.”

On Sunday at the Dallas Angelika, however, Kakalios used action comic books to demonstrate basic physical laws.

If you’re willing to suspend disbelief, he said, “comic books get the science right more often than you might expect.”

The Flash, for example, is not particularly strong, but because he can outrace a bullet, it is theoretically possible for him to catch one in his hands. The same principle, Kakalios noted, allows an ordinary human to casually sip a glass of iced tea that is traveling at 600 mph — if the sipper is sitting in an airplane traveling at precisely the same speed.

Kakalios taught physics and astronomy in obscurity until 2002, he said, when the University of Minnesota’s media office used the opening of the first Spider-Man movie to note that he was teaching a class on superheroes.

“The PR people used to put out press releases on my research on superconductors and electronic noise — and nothing. The day they put out the release on the superhero class, I got calls from The Associated Press, the BBC, CNN, lots of media.”

He looks at the attention as a way to introduce the general public to science.

“People are not anti-intellectual, they are anti-snobbery. If we can relate some of the really cool stuff in a way that is really accessible, that’s a good goal,” he said.

Kakalios said he was an avid reader of comics as a child, and later, as a graduate student — but there was a break in between.

“I gave up comics in high school when I discovered girls — a discovery, by the way, for which I have never received sufficient credit by the scientific community,” he said.

Some comic book feats, he said, are clearly preposterous.

In the movie X-Men, he notes, Cyclops’ eyes emit a constant optic blast that is restrained only by ruby quartz sunglasses. Yet Newton’s Third Law of Motion dictates that the force from those beams would generate an equal thrust back across his face, Kakalios said.

“Either Newton was wrong, or Cyclops has a very tough neck,” he said.

And Superman may be strong enough to pick up a building and fly it across town, but the building’s structure wouldn’t hold together without its foundation.

“By the time Superman arrived, he’d be carrying only a few pieces of cinderblock and some plumbing and wiring,” Kakalios said. ]

He's using stories to help explain science. That is the point. Giving background to a story to make it more tangible.

Makes about as much sense as trying to prove the bible is real, it's just a story folks.

is FUN !
[ One of Kakalios' favorite stories acknowledges this leap of faith. “There's a panel in which The Atom and another character have shrunk to submolecular size, and they're sitting on an electron,” he recalls with a grin. “The Atom's companion says, 'We're smaller than an oxygen molecule. How are we breathing?' The Atom replies, 'I've never really figured that out.'"

But the course isn’t about debunking various characters or storylines, Kakalios explains. The analysis is all part of the fun.

"The most important thing is getting the students to ask the right kinds of questions,” he says. “If a character has wings on her back, what important physical forces and issues do we need to consider if she's going to use them to fly? What kind of wingspan and muscle structure would that require? Hopefully, pointing out issues like that will help them think critically in other situations." ]

"featured" at " Comic Book Universe".