Dr. Manhattan’s Superpowers EXPLAINED

dr. Manhattan is one of the most powerful beings in all of pop culture but how does someone go from normal human - naked nuclear God let's get technical first appearing in the Watchmen graphic novels in 1986 dr. Manhattan is actually the government code name for a dr. Jon Osterman a PhD physicist working in a nuclear physics lab who was worth two part atom-by-atom in an accident eventually though somehow in that same lab dr. Osterman was able to piece himself back together first as a creepy floating nervous system ghost and then eventually as the full ripped blue boy in this form he was basically a God but that's not gonna stop us from questioning his powers and maybe trying to explain some of his abilities with real science first why he blew though the less fun answer to that question of course is that dr. Manhattan is blue simply as an artistic choice it's visually distinct and it's based on a previous character named Captain Atom sure but since dr. Manhattan is so often depicted as glowing I think we can actually use that fact to infer something interesting about his body and its structure but not like that kind of stir if Manhattan here named after the Manhattan Project of course is glowing that his body is either emitting light directly or emitting something that goes on to generate light and there are a number of ways an organism such as John here could be glowing in this way he might be bioluminescent like the Lucifer in inside a Firefly but or he could be glowing fluorescing like the carapace of a scorpion in response to ultraviolet light but none of these processes seem to really be what dr. Manhattan is doing here I think that dr. Manhattan is emitting thing and no I don't think he's just simply emitting light with a wavelength around 450 nanometers no I think something closer to his atomic nature is going on something a lot more dangerous on August 21st 1945 24-year old nuclear physicist Harry k-dog lien jr. was placing tungsten carbide bricks around a core of plutonium every creation of which you can see here he was trying to figure out what bricks and what orientation and how many of them you would need to reflect enough neutrons back down in on the core to make that core of plutonium go critical it was a criticality test on this fateful day however he had an assembly that looked like this and his measurement devices told him it was about to go critical he was gonna take everything apart but then he dropped one of the bricks and the moment the brick hit the assembly it went critical and according to Dog lien he experienced a flash of blue light and a wave of heat if some radiation or particle has enough energy say it's coming from something highly radioactive it has a chance to smash into other atoms and molecules and when it does so it can excite those atoms and molecules electrons or even rip electrons from those particles which go on to then recombine and excite other atoms and molecules in either case when these atoms and molecules return to their unexcited state they get rid of some of that excess energy in the form of photons of light and when this happens in nitrogen and oxygen molecules which makes up the majority of Earth's air those photons are of the blue light wavelength and you can see this for real if you look at something like an open-air cyclotron beam and you see this brilliant electric blue whoa what I'm suggesting is that dr. Manhattan as part of being the kind of being that he be is emitting high-energy particles from his atomic body and ionizing all the air in his immediate vicinity to produce that faint blue glow that we know is possible and ironically even though in the comics John here was framed for causing cancer in his colleagues just by being around them not only would our explanation explain the color it would actually cause cancer if you were near him as ionizing radiation has the ability to destroy and mutate DNA and directly cause cancer that's what happened to Harry k-dog lien jr. as he died 25 days after his experience of a blue glow it's kind of grim but it makes sense and why are we pixelating him he's wearing he's wearing blue undies dr. Manhattan's powers go a lot deeper than this though like all the way down to the very fabric of the universe one of John's more famous feats in the comics is when he teleports himself all the way to Mars it's a fantastical example of his control over his own matter but it also might be an example of his mastery of quantum mechanics what happens when you throw a ball at a wall well classic smart boy Newtonian mechanics dictates exactly what you'd expect it just bounces right off but quantum mechanics does not necessarily now let's say that I have an electron and this barrier this wall is on a similar scale very very very small quantum mechanics says that if I throw this electron at this barrier there is now some non insignificant chance that it doesn't bounce off it passes right through and to fully understand this behavior we need to stop thinking of electrons as solid objects out sorry on the smallest scales particles like electrons can also be understood as waves and these waves are less like waves on an ocean and more like distributions of probability because an electron isn't really in one place until you measure it it's more likely to be found in one spot versus another there is a lot of complicated math and physics that we are skipping over here but just for a second consider our barrier again quantum mechanics says that if we throw our particle wave at this barrier if the probability is good an and the barrier is thin enough there is a nonzero chance that our electron will be measured on the other side as though it just teleported straight through this sounds fantastical but we observe it all the time and it's called quantum tunneling it's the reason why the Sun keeps going it resolves some of our best images in our best microscopes and it's helping the flash memory that is in the device that you're watching me on right now or knees or which one is me because if they're all thinking my thoughts but how my quantum tunneling get our blue boy to Mars though well if he has conscious control over every single piece of his body every atom and molecule which it seems like he has then he might be able to instantaneously arrange every wave function that makes him him in preparation for an unprecedented quantum tunneling event if the doc could control himself all the way down to the quantum level then he might be able to greatly increase the probability of measuring him across a giant barrier that classical mechanics says he wouldn't be able to pass maybe the barrier that is all the air and all the distance and all the space between Earth and Mars he could then collapse his wave function and then be measured on Mars as though he teleported there and it would be the first big muscled blue boat on Mars which be breathtaking amazing breathtaking Wow incredible breathtaking a walking nuclear incident that could teleport anywhere at will would be strong enough but dr. Manhattan's fundamental abilities are his most impressive why is my face being pixelated what is offending you there are four fundamental forces of nature if you had real access to electromagnetism gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces as dr. James key kaleo's the science advisor on the 2009 watchman film suggests dr. Manhattan does then you wouldn't just be powerful or strong you would be able to weave unweave the very sweater of reality I'm tired of people saying fabric scientists often like to think about how the universe would change if the fundamental forces were different could stars form if gravity was weaker if the strong and weak nuclear forces were changed could complex life ever arise and molecules chained themselves together into things such as we what if the charge of an electron was a different constant but this is exactly dr. Manhattan's power think for a second about the ability to change all the forces holding himself or you together all at once with a wave of his hand he could atomized you and we've seen him do that before too Rorschach Rorschach's dan remember that with control over the fundamental forces of nature dr. Manhattan could just add protons and neutrons and electrons to whatever matter was under his influence and basically create anything he could float a hunk of leg to him with reduced gravity and changing electromagnetic forces and then realize the centuries-old dreams of alchemists and add a couple of protons to this to turn lead into gold not that dr. Manhattan would care about such things man can you just go around and force helium atoms together in a fusion like process to solve the energy crisis which is actually Canon in The Watchmen comics and the film with powers like this dr. Manhattan would be like a walking BIGBANG being able to shift in shape reality to his will because when it comes down to it there isn't much more to reality than the laws of physics and this crude matter and just think of dr. Manhattan's perception of time when he can alter what is in this way if you knew your exact space-time coordinates right now you could use them to construct a four dimensional representation of your slice of space-time that we call a hyper surface of the present cool name right it represents where you are right now in space-time and everything that could be considered simultaneous to you not your past not your future but everything that is now now if dr. Manhattan could change space-time to his will and alter it fundamentally think of how his slice of space-time his now might change in terms of these hyper surfaces you and I only experience sequential nows but in Watchmen cannon dr. Manhattan frequently states that he experiences all of time simultaneously like being able to experience more than one slice at any one time and think how that would change your perception of who you are and the world if you could experience everything all at once what would it be like to experience the full dimensionality of space-time well how do you spend most of your day I think many of us find ourselves lost in thought at any one time we're either worrying about the future or making plans or reminiscing about the past or thinking about things we could have done differently very rarely do we find ourselves exactly in the now if dr. Manhattan could experience all of his time at the same time would you blame him for feeling less human and being less connected to humanity so much of what defines us as people is our imagined relationship to the past we can't change and a future that we haven't experienced it yet if dr. Manhattan can experience all of this then it might be reasonable to assume that his humaneness would just disintegrate dr. Manhattan is basically if the laws of physics had a will came a big naked will and I love that not necessarily the naked part but I love that unlike for most other superheroes the question of why dr. Manhattan is so powerful is a fully answerable question more than just about any other super being dr. Manhattan is because science hey do you know where all the other scorpions went cuz I bought a lot of scorpions if you see any scorpions leading you tell me if you see any scorpions there's a lot of scorpions laying around [Music] if we can't explain dr. Manhattan's blue glow with high-energy particles coming from his body a weird thing would happen to you would see him even with your eyes closed when high-energy particles move through a medium faster than light does in that medium as high-energy particles can in something like water or say the vitreous fluid in your eyes it can create kind of like a shock wave of light called Cherenkov radiation and it produces a flash like a blue glow you can see it when nuclear reactors start up but if dr. Manhattan was near you and your eyes were closed you would still get flashes of light in your eyes and we know this because this was reported by Apollo astronauts they reported seeing flashes of light even with their eyes closed when they're sleeping a couple times a second and that would happen with dr. Manhattan there's no escape [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 1,318,248

Keywords: Nerdist, Because Science, Kyle Hill, Dr.Manhattan, Watchmen, DC, Comics, Superheroes, Super Powers, Quantum physics, nuclear energy, nuclear radiation, alan moore

Id: f4QhfwpvdrI

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019