Physicist Breaks Down Superhero Physics From Movies & TV | WIRED

hi my name is Rhett Elaine Brett is a physics professor at Southeastern Louisiana University today I'll be breaking down amazing feats of physics from superheroes in movies and television superhero landing Deadpool landing that's really hard on your knees you know one of the great things about Deadpool both in the comics and in the movies is that he breaks the fourth wall and interacts with the audience I know right in this case he talks about the superhero landing superhero landing superhero wait for it the idea is a superhero lands with one knee one fist and a foot on the ground so three contact points but it's a very sudden move it's not like a normal landing it does look really cool and I think happens all the time [Music] and is that better than the way a normal person would hit the ground the answer is no that's really hard on your knees totally impractical they all do so you got to think about the forces acting on a person while they're landing from falling from somewhere the key is to have the force as small as possible one way to do that is to increase the distance over which you stop so if I jump and land on the ground I let my knees Bend and my center of mass moves down while my knees Bend increase the distance over which I stop and decreases the force there's a thing called a parachute landing fall and you don't even stand up you hit you bend down you roll over on the ground and you increase the distance over which you stop even more that's the best way to do it the superhero landing it's just gonna be a bad idea we all know how this turns out kinetic energy black panther kinetic energy is a quantity you can use to describe objects in motion we have momentum which is mass times velocity and then there's kinetic energy which is one-half mass velocity squared you know kinetic energy isn't a real thing it's a way to view nature it's a way to view interactions so anything that's moving would have kinetic energy if I take a baseball and I throw it it's moving it has mass so it has kinetic energy black panther suit somehow has an interaction between the bullet and his suit to take the kinetic energy of the bullets and store it in some type of internal battery and then once he has enough energy stored up he can release it in a energy pull of some type to do whatever he wants I'm not sure exactly how it works that's what makes him Black Panther and the technology of Wakanda is beyond me to fully understand recoil wonder why [Music] so what is recoil suppose I am standing on a frozen lake and I have a basketball or some heavy weighted ball and I throw the ball well the ball's momentum is gonna change because I exert a force on it but the ball pushes back on me with the same force so I'm gonna have the exact same change momentum that's gonna make me move back course it makes complete sense this is the idea of recoil when you throw something one way you go back the other way so a bullet has momentum it's moving it has mass it has but it turns out that it's moving really fast but it has pretty low mass and it doesn't have that much momentum if you collide a bullet with a bracelet or a person in some way then that person would have to recoil with the same momentum but the person has such a large mass the recoil velocity would be super tiny and so you don't really get recoil from normal bullets when they hit people so in this case Wonder Woman deflecting a bullet it should be fine is there anything else you wanna show me contact area Justice League I'll take the ones on the right the Superman building things impossible forget about the flying forget about the super-strength even with that he couldn't do this so imagine you had a jello cake it's like a big blob of jell-o this big is this a bad time to bring up my blood sugar and you wouldn't lift up the jello with a toothpick by pushing on the bottom the toothpick would just go right through the jello on top of that the jello would probably break in half too so both of those things are a problem Superman's pushing in the middle of the building trying to support the whole thing he would just poke right through the whole thing and the building would fall if he wants to actually lift the building he needs to increase the contact area either get bigger hands which that's probably not gonna happen or he could possibly have some cables that attach to multiple locations on the building and then lift it from the top maybe it doesn't look as cool but it'd be more plausible at least weird and so many ways strength spider-man homecoming at the beginning spider-man uses his webs to connect one side of the boat to the other in an attempt to prevent it from falling apart and it doesn't work [Applause] it could be any number of reasons particularly he just doesn't have enough webs to actually exert enough force between the two halves to prevent them from falling apart the ultimate tensile strength the point at which the tension breaks were the string breaks for spider-man's webs I mean you'd first need to know what's made of and then you need to know the diameter of it it's really difficult to estimate how much that could be a better way to approach this would be to calculate the tension that he exerts on the boat when it breaks the the more they lean the greater the gravitational force is on that piece to pull it apart and you need a lot of force to keep these two things together and maybe his webs just aren't strong enough to do that great job Peter I suspect the 98% means that the total force needed to keep one side of the boat up is 98 percent of what you need to prevent it from falling over if the force isn't great enough the boat tilts and it stretches that web and eventually the web breaks and then you have no force from the web and that makes more webs break and have a sort of cascading failure hi spider-man band practice [Applause] the Ironman suit may be more successful at pushing the boat back together for a couple of reasons number one it's possible that his mini micro thruster rockets that attach to the side of the ship are just stronger than spider-man twelves the second big thing is that those forces can keep moving as the boat moves whereas spider-man's force is a static force once you stretch a pass out it can't it can't pull it back together it just prevents it from falling apart further the ship floats because it prevents water from getting inside and makes it overall effective didn't see less than water once you violate the integrity of the hull game's over that thing's is gonna sink really fast I don't think spider-man's gonna have enough time to push it back together I don't think Ironman is gonna have enough time to push it back together now it's just a movie so we're okay with that what do you want me to do I think you've done enough terminal velocity Captain America the Winter Soldier see where to parachute no he was [Music] so when Captain America jumps out of the plane there's really two forces that come into play the first is the gravitational force that pulls him down but there's another force as he starts to fall an increase in speed there's an air resistance force he's colliding with the air molecules and those air molecules push back on him in the opposite direction that he's moving and in fact it gets to the part where it is the same as the gravitational force now he has an upward pushing force in a downward pushing force that are equal magnitude with equal magnitude forces he moves at a constant speed we call this terminal velocity because he doesn't get any faster when Captain America first leaves the plane he starts off in a standard skydiving position this position allows the largest surface area for the highest air resistant force and therefore the lowest terminal velocity it also allows you to move your hands in a way that you could actually control your motion by pushing the air in different directions towards the end of the jump he actually goes into a more vertical position this decreases the surface area that collides with the air and makes him fall even faster he wants to hit the water feet first so he flips over hits the water feet first in like a pencil dive or pencil jump and the nice thing about the feet first vertical position when hitting the water is that it will make him penetrate the deepest into the water which increases the distance of where tree stops and decreases the stopping force and gives them a better chance of surviving I mean it's Captain America so these programs survive no matter what net force Iron Man 3 see that guy I'm gonna swing by are you just gonna grab I'll Electrify your arm you won't be able to open your hand we can do this Heather once you start having multiple people in a chain hanging together the person on the bottom they're just hanging like a normal person the next person has to pull with the force equal to their own weight and the force of the person pulling down below them which is their weight the third person has to pull with the force of three people and you can see it starts getting really large and uncontrollable Ironman wants to solve this problem by essentially electrically shocking their muscles into contracting so they can't let go I'll Electrify your arm you won't be able to open your hand I don't think that would work for a number of reasons I get a lot of this it's okay first if you get like five people in a line it's probably not just about muscles things start to break in human arms and it wouldn't work the second thing is that you can have an electrical shock make people's muscles contract but the problem is that you normally need a closed circuit you need a path for the current to go there and all the way back and he just has a chain there's no way for the current to get back to Iron Man and use of power supply to force this shock gripping nice work guys good team effort all around go us miss integration the boys when you ever so a trains running really quick and he runs into the girl what would really happen I mean it's such a hard question because it really depends on a train it is he invincible or is he like just a really fast normal human if he's a really fast normal human colliding with a stationary human they would both have the same amount of damage because if he pushes on her with the forest she pushes back with the same force so whatever happened to her would happen to him in the clip she just turns into goo so clearly he has some other powers other than just being super fast would he just push right through or would which she recoil well it really depends on again how fast he's going and how he actually hits her one part of him hits her before the rest of him does he could essentially poke through her I know that's kind of gross and once he's done that he he kind of disables the integrity of her body such that it's possible she could go splatter it all over the place Oh watching that clip there is one issue that that is weird if he's running this way and hits her why does some of the blood go back on on her boyfriend if it appears that he hitting her would push all the blood in the same direction he was moving so I mean it's kind of a gross clip but it shows an important point in the story and that the super heroes aren't always nice guys right running on water be Incredibles [Music] so let's say you want to run on water you need an upward force to counteract the gravitational force that pushes down one way to do this would be kind of like slapping the water if I hit the water with my hand or foot then the water pushes up on me but it's not a huge force and it doesn't last for very long I don't know I don't know how he does it that means that you have to hit the water really hard and then hit it again really hard so you've really got to move your feet back and forth super quick in order to get this whole thing to work you must have been booking how fast you think you were Holly man I don't think a normal person can do it but clearly - can do it [Music] so when he stops and kind just hovers there for a little bit on the water I think it's the wily coyote effect so if you remember wily coyote would chase the roadrunner he'd golf a cliff and then he'd say well I just realized I'm now on the ground and then he falls it's very dramatic and it's kind of funny and I think that's exactly what happens with - of course as soon as he stops he would start sinking into the water and fall down but it's its comedic effect what are you waiting for [Music] blind Ironman ready and three two [Music] in this scene Tony Stark is testing out his Iron Man suit he had built one before but it wasn't as sophisticated as this one so he needs to make sure the thrusters are configured properly to allow him to fly so imagine you had like a pencil and you want to hold it on your hand right here and you're holding it from the bottom if you push up it's very easily just gonna tip over and and so rockets from the bottom of a device are a little problematic real Rockets do this by having dimples on the thrusters that can change the direction very easily but there's another solution and that's to have a higher thruster and that's what Ironman does with this hand when his hands are higher up then the thrust is above the center mass and it makes it much more stable and on top of that he has his hand further apart from his body and that further increases stability in fact there's a guy that has real-life Iron Man suit type flying and he uses jets on his hands and it's much more stable than putting them on your feet so this is exactly how I would do it if I was gonna do it impact force guardians of the galaxy [Music] I'm not sure what exactly Groot does in this case but if he stays completely rigid as a rigid sphere then it's not really going to help people inside now if he has some type of I don't know in a car we call it a crumple zone where the car actually changes dimensions and crumples up during a collision this would increase the distance over which it stops which would decrease acceleration and it would make it more survivable for the people inside another aspect of this cage idea could be one to protect from things like debris that gets thrown around during the crash that would definitely work I mean if you have a shell around you and something comes flying in that shell could block it it's not just that you want wood to be strong you definitely want it to be flexible drew maybe he's like can pick maybe he can pick what kind of wood he grows into so he could make it both flexible and strong depending on the situation thank you see hoots the only one of you who has a clue if I was Groot which I am clearly not Groot I would have liked things go down below the sphere that you couldn't see and have those impact with the ground first and have them kind of be your crumple zone and then keep the sphere rigid to protect from debris and then you'd have a rigid part as a sphere and then a springy part below for spares the defenders so in this scene from the defenders we have Jessica Jones super strong and Luke Cage super strong and when they punch they really would have to consider what angle they push at if I push with some super large force then that same force that can be applied to me because forces come in pairs forces are always an interaction between two objects so if I punch horizontally the person could go flying across the room but I'd go flying back the other way and that may be effective but it wouldn't look cool there's a better way to punch if I was a super-powered puncher and I punched up then that person would push down on me and I would get pushed into the floor but I would not get pushed back so if you're a super-powered person you can't just go around punching like a normal person you have to think about the consequences of your actions but we should probably all do that anyway just look how you been I'm sorry x-ray vision Man of Steel [Music] so this is the part where Clark Kent starts to realize that he has powers and one of those powers is x-ray vision how does x-ray vision work I think the first question is how does vision work we see things because light reflects off of them and enters our eye or maybe it's a it's a light source itself but light has to enter your eye in order to see things x-rays are just another type of light with that smaller wavelength than visible light but in this case how does Superman have x-ray vision is stuff coming out of his eyes or stuff coming into his eyes if x-rays are coming out of his eyes he can't see them it's just shooting out there are x-rays around background radiation it's not very much and that could pass through people's bodies and he could see them but overall it's definitely a problematic thing to be able to see through people with just rising wind up Avengers endgame [Music] so Captain America has Thor's hammer and he's trying to hit Thanos he could just hold the hammer and swing his whole arm and hit him but by winding up the hammer first it's going in a circular motion the hammer is actually going at a greater speed if he times just right his arms moving up and the Hammers moving up relative to the hand so that gives it a much greater speed on impact with Thanos his head so greater impact speed would mean a greater impact force and hopefully knock him down in this case there's no real benefit to spinning at multiple times except for the main benefit that it looks cool and if you're a superhero and you're in you know a big battle number one you got to look cool give me that conclusion I think these are just great examples of even if they're not real physics physics is still all around us and we can find it in the most trivial things even superhero movies so physics in movies I'm all for it even if it's not 100 percent correct because what if you did have completely realistic physics and superhero movies it might not be that much fun we go to the movies now for the correct physics we go there because they don't have correct physics really and and I'm fine with that

Channel: WIRED

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Keywords: arts & entertainment, ott technique critique, physics expert, physics, physics wired, physics marvel, superhero movies, superhero physics, black panther, black panther super powers, super hero super powers, superhero, superhero super powers, wired superhero, technique critique, technique critique superheros, physics professor breaks down, physics super hero movies, superheroes, marvel superheroes, marvel physics, marvel movie breakdown, superhero landing, wired

Id: eLhkC5bEPlU

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020