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An Engineer Looks at Superheroes
Having an engineering degree makes it hard to watch superhero movies. Antman’s ability to shrink and grow, for example, is supposedly done by changing the distance between the atoms in his body. Therefore, no matter his size, he’s still 200lbs. Fine. Except that this 200lb man can ride on the back of an ant when he’s tiny. And when he’s 80ft tall, instead of floating off into the air like a hot air balloon, he’s heavy enough to smash a passenger jet when he falls on it.
The Six Million Dollar Man and the Winter Soldier had bionic arms that enabled them to pick up cars. Why didn’t their arms rip out of their very unbionic shoulder sockets, or why didn’t their backbones collapse?
And remember the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeves? At the climax, the evil Lex Luthor launches two nuclear missiles – one aimed at America’s east coast and the other at the west coast – leaving Superman with the dilemma of deciding which coast to save.
He destroys the east coast missile (well done, Chris) but can’t quite catch up to the other one, and Lois Lane, along with California, is obliterated. Okay, that makes sense. How does he solve this terrible problem? He flies faster than the speed of light and turns back time.
In other words, he can’t catch up to a missile lumbering along at the speed of sound – a mere 750 mph, depending upon temperature and air pressure – but he can fly faster than 186,282 miles per second, or 670,616,629 miles per hour!
No wonder kids avoid the STEM subjects in school these days!
Published in General
Yes, he was.
It was the success of that movie that caused Paramount to hire director Nicholas Meyer to try and salvage the Star Trek franchise, after the poor reviews of the first movie in ’79, and the result was “The Wrath of Kahn” three years later.
I didn’t know that. Thanks.
Because changes clothes in the blink of an eye, catching bullets in his bare hand, flying faster than the speed of sound, and flying in outer space, all without the slightest equipment, that was all proper physics. But then that bit about flying counterclockwise around the Earth, ha! Balderdash!
You must know some very interesting specimens.
Superheroes and engineering… well, L. Sprague de Camp did pretty good… more to the topic sort of, it all went downhill when superhero movies got to the point that live-action special effects were better than what could be done with cartoons. I maintain that the Adam West “Batman” along with the original Ultraman represent the pinnacle of superheroes on film, mainly for the dialogue and costuming. My kids feel the same way because I’ve soured them on “modern” superhero movies due to my verbal outbursts in response to the dishonest physics really bugging me…
But… Larry Niven’s essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex“ – no link because it’s dirty – is the King of superhero deconstruction – from a sort-of STEM perspective. Once I read that I had no problem if my vintage 1970s comic books went up in flames. I felt ashamed…
I’d love to be able to say that I’ve never really liked superhero movies or Sci-Fi because they defy the laws of physics…it would be nicer than suspecting myself of limited (or, worse, timid) imagination.
I do wonder how much the 120-pound woman beating up the 200 pound men thing is feeding some dangerously anti-feminist forms of feminism. As fewer and fewer Americans have direct experience of violence, broadly defined to include things like hunting, and slaughtering animals for food, what we see on the screen becomes evidence for silly statements like “woman and men are equally strong.”
Maybe it is a human quality—flaw or asset, depending on the circumstances—to dwell as much in imagination as in evidence-based reality? For instance, most of the time, it seems, I imagine that my husband and I are roughly the same size. If we lived in a more traditional, even primitive world, the reality of our sexual dimorphism would be more obvious and more urgent more of the time. As in: It would matter, because I might depend on him for quotidian rather than occasional/theoretical protection from other men. Since that isn’t much of an issue here and now, I have the luxury of forgetting…and so, now and then, I catch myself: I happen to see our forearms side-by-side, and realize “OMG! Look how much stronger he is!”
A good friend of mine assured me confidently that women and men are equally strong—or would be, if not for sexism and whatnot. She’s intelligent and educated…but she’s lesbian, so it’s possible she doesn’t get as many opportunities to assess this this particular dimension of reality.
The Ant-Man film was the only one that I couldn’t watch to the end because shrinking to the atomic level and yet remaining full bodied was just too ludicrous.
I have no idea what that means, but it doesn’t sound kind.
The point is that you can suspend disbelief for a fantasy, of course. Faster than a speeding bullet, and so forth, are all part of the rules of the stories. But to then take our willing suspension of disbelief and then spin the earth backwards just goes too far.
Can you imagine the forces required to spin the earth backwards? Nothing would survive on the surface of the planet where the force was applied. Who knows what would happen to the molten core. And then, why would rotation have anything to do with time?
As to comparisons with Star Trek time travel, at least there is a vague, but silly, connection to the theory of relativity and the speed of light, confusing enough for the viewer to accept it. The difference also is the Star Trek trick is used to set up the story. It’s the assumption you need to have to even have the story at all, and the story has a purpose requiring it. In Superman, it comes at the end as a non sequitur to solve a problem that isn’t fundamental to the story. That is, the writers could have solved the problem in many other imaginative ways other than suddenly introducing time travel. On top of that, Superman is powerful, but how did he suddenly become an expert on relativity? Being from Krypton may have made him strong, and he wasn’t a stupid person, but where did he get the education needed to turn back time?
So those are the “specimens” of logic that made it a very uncomfortable scene to watch.
Important safety tip.
Simply that the whole stack requires suspension of disbelief unless you know of specimens that actually catch bullets in their bare hands and so on. No unkindness intended.
Really? If you’re listing scientific ridiculousness in the Marvel movies, I don’t think that would even make my top hundred…
Important safety tip.
I have an engineering degree too, yet I enjoy a lot of these movies. Granted, I believe there are too many of them being made, but many are quite entertaining if you put logic in your hip pocket for a couple of hours. What I don’t like is when they’re inconsistent within their own set of rules, as you point out with the Superman example.
She likely wants to take the statement as an absolute, to where reality is more like competing bell curves, in that there are a certain percentage of women who are stronger than a certain percentage of men. One of the local high schools had a volleyball coach who was roughly the size of an NFL offensive tackle, but if you matched her strength up against actual NFL tackles, or men in general in the 6-5, 300-plus pound range, odds are pretty good she’d lose out. But compare her to some guy who’s 5-2 and 130 pounds, and she likely gets the best of that strength competition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahHThBjDB0
Cat just couldn’t wait.
But again, if it’s Superman going back in time, then the Earth only APPEARS to be rotating “backwards,” from HIS perspective. All life is intact, the molten core is intact…
It would have been sufficient if they had “simply” shown Superman as stopping his faster-than-light (or whatever) flying, and then Earth starts rotating in the proper direction again. Superman could have gone back in time far enough to save Lois, and that’s all. But only a fraction of an Earth rotation would have been needed for that. So, maybe insufficiently dramatic for a movie.
In the Star Trek episodes and movies, of course they’re “always” going faster than light, that’s what warp drive is all about. When they fly close to the sun they go back in time, quickly – they don’t have to fly at the sun for 200 years to go back in time by 200 years – and when they “slingshot” back away from the sun, they start going forward in time again, but again FASTER THAN NORMAL. i.e., they don’t have to fly away from the sun for 200 years to get back to their own time. It was “only” a matter of braking.
… also, if he turned back time, he would be in the same position, because the first missile would no longer be destroyed. I remember noticing that when I was a kid.
I have often said that superhero movies should only ever be in cartoon format, and that we should just consider it to be fantasy/magic land where not all of the rules of physics apply. Trying to do live-action superheroes seems really silly to me.
My wife was watching some show on her tablet last night, and it showed 2 police officers (apparently one was corrupt) fighting out on a beach… there was a woman (presumably the star of the show) hiding behind some barrier, trying to get a good shot. Looked like she was about 50 yards out. As they’re wrestling, she takes her shot and gets the bad-guy in the shoulder. I chimed in with a sarcastic quip about: “The magical female badass character … because of course.”
I don’t mind watching some of those things just for the fun of – “hey, now let’s pretend like it’s a hot chick doing all of this stuff,” but then I remember that people are actually quite serious about this women’s equality nonsense and thinking that women are physically capable of doing things that they simply are not. Now, I’m not saying a woman isn’t just as qualified to make an insanely long shot within a 6-inch circle on a moving target with a pistol at 50 yards … it would be equally impossible for both sexes.
And Batman, who would be dead a thousand times over.
I do like that they address this in some of the comics, though, with his suit (bulletproof fabric, or an exoskeleton, etc… etc… etc…). But I’ve always said that he just needs to visit Diana on her island and have them give him some magical physical protection and just be done with it. Otherwise, he’s a nonsense superhero (and still, of course, my favorite).
No, you missed the point there. If Superman goes back in time after ALREADY having destroyed the first missile, then past-Superman still does destroy it. Unless time-traveling-Superman were to stop past-Superman.
There might be situations where Superman would want to stop past-himself from doing something he “already” did, but that wouldn’t be one of them.
Where you could get into a paradox issue, though, is when time-travel Superman rescues Lois from the crash, after a while “original” Superman arrives on the scene maybe after they’ve already left. Not finding Lois dead, “original” Superman then has no reason to go back in time…
Time-travel Superman could tell him what he has to do, but without Lois being dead, would he have the “adrenaline rush” necessary to do it? In addition to defying his father’s edict?
Yeah, the difference between men and women is simply an undeniable fact. You have examples of this all over the place – with professional-level female sports teams being destroyed by high school boys teams, etc… etc… Female world records in track/sprinting/whatever being blown out of water, again by high school boys. There is literally no sport on the planet where the highest level achieved by a female cannot be bested by males at the amateur level. And that’s not a knock on girls, it’s just a fact. We do feminism no services by pretending that fiction is reality. Same, of course, goes for a lot of other gender-related nonsense we’re dealing with these days.
Before long all the “women’s” records will be held by men pretending to be women.
That likely ends when the men start competing and winning women’s events where real money in the six- or seven-figures is handed out. Woke feminists will be less woke when there’s money on the table.
But most woke feminists aren’t money-winning athletes. And even if/though most money-winning athletes aren’t woke feminists, the much larger number of woke feminists might be willing to push them off the cliff… well, throw them under the bus is probably more acceptable… in the name of ideological purity.
The battle’s already sort of been joined, but at the amateur sports levels, with Martina Navratilova being trashed by the ‘T’ part of the LGBTQ coalition for noting the XX vs. XY disparity that would put biological women at a disadvantage. It was something tennis players at the pro level had to actually deal with in the late 1970s, with the Richard Raskin/Renee Richards situation.
Martina was sort of left out all alone here, but that’s because for now we’re talking almost exclusively about amateur sports. If you start getting men-identifying-as-women winning USTA or LPGA events, or taking roster sports on WNBA teams and getting higher salaries due to the greater athleticism their XY chromosomes give them, then you’re going to see a lot more women coming out on Navratilova’s side, including others who (like Martina) are in the ‘L’ part of the LGBTQ coalition.
Well, us normal people can’t disagree with someone like Martina, because that would make us homophobes. But Martina can’t win against the trans athletes because trans has a higher intersectionality score than just regular homosexuals.
I remember an interesting essay by Larry Niven about the problems Superman and Lois Lane would have as a couple….
Man of Steel Woman of Kleenex.
Mentioned twice already, in previous comments. But thank you for linking to the text.
It’s not just about Superman and Lois Lane either, it also deals with Clark Kent’s adolescence and other… issues…
I got about halfway, but frankly it was boring. I thought it would be funnier.