University professor uses comic books to teach physics

[Bit Bitch]

Hello,

The following story from the Nando Times (http://www.nandotimes.com)
was sent to you by: Bit Bitch (carey@tstonramp.com).

And Bit Bitch had this to say:

I want to go take his class damnit :)


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University professor uses comic books to teach physics

By ANDRES YBARRA
Associated Press 

MINNEAPOLIS (May 10, 2002 06:19 a.m. EDT) - Is Spider-Man's
web really strong enough to support him as he swings from
building to building?

Why did Superman's home planet of Krypton explode?

How much would the Flash need to eat in order to run around
the globe in 80 seconds?

The man to ask is University of Minnesota physics professor
Jim Kakalios.

Kakalios, who has taught physics at the school since 1988,
is entering his second semester teaching an elective course
for freshmen called Science in Comic Books. Or, as he calls
it in his syllabus, "Everything I Know of Science I Learned
>From Reading Comic Books."

He says using comic books to teach the fundamentals of physics
is a great way to stimulate his students. "It seems by the
time they left the class, they were looking at the world
with a more critical and more scientific eye," he says.

The fun lies in pointing out where the comic book writers
got the science right, and where they got it wrong, he says.

Kakalios, a comic book lover whose office is filled with
action figures, came up with the idea for his class after
applying physics to a 1973 Spider-Man comic in which Peter
Parker's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, dies.

Gwen is knocked from a bridge by the evil Green Goblin, but
Spider-Man catches her with his webbing an instant before
she hits the water. When Spider-Man pulls her up, he discovers
to his horror that she is dead.

While Spidey was shocked, Kakalios was not.

The professor estimated Gwen's falling velocity, applied
Newton's Second Law of Motion and calculated the G-forces
exerted when she went from 95 mph to a standstill in an instant.
"It's not surprising her neck broke," Kakalios says.

Kakalios made Gwen's death an exam problem during the course's
first semester last fall.

The explosion of Krypton, part of Superman lore, is one of
those cases where the comic book writers got the physics
right, Kakalios says.

In the early Superman comics, the explanation for his superpowers
was that he came from a planet whose gravity was much greater
than Earth's, Kakalios says. Thus a hero so strong that on
Earth, he could leap a tall building in a single bound.

Kakalios calculated Krypton's gravity by working backward
from the force required to leap a building on Earth. From
there, Kakalios concluded that Superman's planet must have
had a core of superdense - and dangerously unstable - material.
"Then you realize why Krypton exploded," he says.

In what is likely to be of interest to fans of the box-office
hit "Spider-man," Kakalios concluded that Spidey's web is
plenty strong enough to swing him from a building or catch
a falling heroine. The comic book says the hero's webbing
has the tensile strength of steel; from that, Kakalios calculated
it could support a couple of tons.

For his final exam, Kakalios had students choose a comic
book scenario to work as a physics problem.

History major Kristin Barbieri, 19, tried to figure out how
much caloric energy the Flash would need to circle the globe
in 80 seconds, as he did in one comic book. She concluded
that the superhero simply could not have eaten enough to
do it.

"He would have been able to get the first burst of energy,
but he would have sunk (in an ocean) after that," Barbieri
says.

Computer science major Eric Caron, 19, also worked a Flash
problem. In one comic book, the Flash vibrated his molecules
to melt ice that encased him. Caron tried to figure out how
fast the hero would have had to vibrate.

"It was close to 6,000 mph hour," Caron says. "It's not the
most realistic thing. But hey, if he can run at light speed
..." 
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