Just rambling

This week, I thought I would change the mood a little bit from last time. I was thinking about a subject I heard about a while ago, and it struck me as odd that someone would put so much thought into the subject. That subject is physics. More specifically, how they apply to a group of fictional characters known as meta-humans. They even have written a book, The Science of Superheroes, about it, going into great detail how superhuman abilities from the comics, cartoons, and movies could or could not work within the confines of the physical world. And the one of the few things I can say about that is that when you try to mix fictional characters and abilities with nonfictional rules, it never turns out well. Take super strength, flight, and super speed, for instance. With super strength, not only would a person be dense enough to literally leave cracks in the floor when just walking, if they tried to lift anything, it would just cave in over them because their hands do not have a big enough surface area to distribute the object over, so it would be like poking a sheet of metal with a pin, while a person could possibly output enough energy to lift it, because of the fact that the area actually in contact with the sheet is so small, only the part touching the pin would be lifted. With flight, a person would need to be able to control, with their mind, either gravity itself, or a force that is stronger than gravity. Since no person is capable of this, this super power is out of the question right here, but for the sake of completeness, let's assume that a person somehow was capable of this. Now, the power of flight does not include the power of invulnerability, so basically anything you fly into, including bugs, would cause major damage to that person's body, thus rendering this power obsolete. Now, for super speed, a person would have to have a huge energy source, and be immune to friction., or at least close to it. Since the human body is only capable of breaking down the substances digested, not enough energy could be used that way, even if the person's metabolism was super fast. The only way to get enough energy required for an endeavor like this would be to have an external power source that is capable of creating energy in the form that a human body uses it, and it would also have to transfer that energy directly to the muscle tissues. DC Comics tried to explain The Flash's powers in a similar manner to this, and called it The Speed Force, except they took it one step further. In the DC universe, The Speed Force is an entire dimension of energy that is the “source of all speed,” and is what allows The Flash the ability to run faster than the speed of light. This contradicts physics, however, because in order to run faster than the speed of light, one must have infinite energy. This fits into the idea of the Speed Force. What does not fit, is the conservation of energy. According to the conservation of energy, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. In order to have an infinite energy supply, energy would have to be created, and this could not possibly work. Not to mention the fact that somehow no one who has taken the name of Flash in the comics has ever had friction or durability to worry about. According to DC, this “infinite” energy source is also able to keep the people using it from being affected by both friction, and all the objects that they run into with every step. Now, to sum up my views on this, I have only this to say: when super powers are involved, the laws of physics are not.

-Thomas Pearson