- Why are you able to
shock the God of Thunder?
Let's get technical.
Even if you're not a Marvel fan,
you probably know precisely two things
about the character known as Thor.
One, hammer.
Two, lightning at some point.
But despite all of his
electrical based superpowers,
movies like Thor: Ragnarok
established that Thor
is not immune to all forms of electricity.
Why though?
Shouldn't his power over lightning
make more minor shocks
completely harmless?
This seems like a valid criticism,
but I do think there
could be something more
technical going on.
And the answer may shock you.
First, we should understand
what Thor is the god of.
Lightning is one of the
most spectacular phenomenons
in nature, a rapid equalization
of charge differentials
that creates a storm
of ridiculous numbers.
When negative charges built up in cloud
finally equalize with the
positive ground charges
here on Earth, a lightning
bolt jumps across the sky
that's 10 times hotter than
the surface of the Sun,
carrying 100 million volts
and traveling at a third
the speed of light.
It illuminates the night
sky with electric fury.
Obviously, we know a lot about lightning,
but perhaps shockingly, some
of it still remains a mystery.
For example, we know that the
accumulation and separation
of positive and negative
charges inside storm clouds
is where lightning comes from.
However, when we measure the magnitude
of the electrical field
inside of these clouds,
we find that mathematically,
there isn't enough charge
to form a lightning bolt
and yet those lightning
bolts happen anyway.
So we can't call it magic
and we don't want to,
but we can't yet call everything
about lightning, science.
Maybe cosmic rays has
something to do with it?
In any case, lightning happens,
and when it happens to you,
it can obviously be very bad.
There are five main ways a lightning bolt
can potentially be lethal,
and the first you're
probably most familiar with
is a direct strike.
However, this is actually
the least likely way
for a lightning bolt to kill you.
A much more likely way to
die via lightning strike
is through contact strikes.
So, for example, if you were holding on
to something conductive
and that got struck,
and then you got some of that
current running through you.
You unfortunately hear
about this kind of strike
all the time when scared livestock
bunch up against a metal
fence during a storm
and then the fence gets struck and yeah.
Another kind of lightning strike
that barely scratches Thor
and is still more likely
than a direct strike
is called a streamer,
which is an offshoot of
the return stroke that
travels up into the sky
from a lightning bolt and it kinda
travels through you instead
of through the main part
of that lightning bolt.
Another more likely way
than a direct strike
is called a side splash of current,
like if a lightning bolt struck a tree
and then part of that
current jumped over into you.
But by far, the most deadly
form of lightning strike,
accounting for over half
of all strike fatalities,
is called ground current.
When a lightning bolt strikes the ground,
it doesn't just disappear.
Some of that current spreads
out in all directions
from the strike site looking for places
and things to travel through.
If you are too close,
you will be one of
those pathways it takes.
Some of that current
will travel up one leg,
across your body, causing potential death
and a lot of damage and then
travels out the other leg.
Thor is apparently immune
to all lightning-based electrocutions.
He gets struck by lightning
all the time and shrugs it off.
Now, we may not be Asgardian,
but when it comes to lightning,
humans are pretty resilient too.
A lightning strike can kill you.
It can blow off your shoes.
It can burn your clothes.
It can leave you with
lifelong, chronic side effects.
However, your chances of surviving
an encounter with lightning
are upwards of 90%.
Pretty good.
When the worst does happen, it's because
atmospheric electricity is
not just finding its way
through your skin and your muscles.
It's literally going
through your cardiovascular
and nervous systems, and
it doesn't take that much
electric current at all to
interrupt your heart and stop it.
Knowing the gigantic
numbers behind lightning,
the temperatures, the voltages,
you would expect this survival
rate to be a lot lower.
Why isn't it a lot lower?
Well, thanks to a quirk of physics,
the majority of a lightning bolt
doesn't go through our bodies.
It goes around it.
And this may be the reason
why Thor can handle lightning
but not an alien space Taser.
Ooh, ooh.
If Thor was a specific kind
of electrical conductor,
it can explain this tase of the MCU.
MCU tase four. (screams)
You have probably heard of AC/DC before,
but in our context, it
means alternating current
or direct current.
Electrical current is
the flow of electrons
through something like a wire,
and when they do that, they can either go
in one direction directly
or back and forth in
alternating directions.
AC powers just about
everything you can think of,
and DC is the power we get
from something like a battery.
Now, when electrons flow
through something like a wire
to power, say, the device
you're watching me on right now,
if we were to cut the wire in half
and look for where the electrons
are when they're flowing,
where would they be?
How would they be
distributed in that wire?
Well, your first guess
would be my first guess too,
which is they're evenly distributed,
they're flowing equally
through all parts of the wire.
And we would be correct if we were talking
about direct current.
However, in alternating current,
the electrons don't flow
like this through the wire.
They flow like this.
They move themselves as far
away from the center as possible
and flow along the edges.
This is called the skin effect,
and it can be so pronounced in some cases
that we can make our
conductors like wires hollow
because so many electrons,
the majority of them,
are flowing along the outside edge.
The shape of this wire kinda
reminds of Loki's horn.
It's, but then he's, he got
strangled by an eggplant emoji.
The skin effect could
determine what kinds of shocks
Thor is safe from.
As we talked about many
times on this program,
electricity and magnetism
are linked, electromagnetism,
so when you have a current
flowing through a conductor
like a wire, that electrical current alone
will create an associated magnetic field.
If you start changing that
electrical current though,
like alternating current
does, you will start changing
the associated magnetic field.
And because a magnetic field
can move electrons around,
electromagnetism, another
associated electrical current
is created inside of the conductor.
However, these eddy
currents, as they are called,
flow in the opposite direction.
These opposing currents
can be crazy strong.
Just look at the magnetic
eddy currents that are created
inside of an aluminum block
when someone tries to push
it over and move it around
inside of a very strong
MRI magnetic field.
It looks as though it's operating
under a different gravity.
When all this happens in
something like a wire,
the eddy currents, just
because of geometry,
are more concentrated near
the center of the wire,
which encourages the rest of the current
to flow where there's least
resistance around the center,
which pushes all of the current
effectively towards the outside edges.
This is the skin effect,
and it turns out that
the better the conductor
and the higher frequency AC,
the more pronounced the skin effect.
No, not gonna tase me, bro.
No, not the hair.
Lightning isn't really AC or DC,
but its voltages can ramp up so quickly
that it can mimic high
frequency alternating current
and therefore lightning has an
incredibly large skin effect.
This is why when we're
struck by lightning,
we don't literally explode
and why in a lightning storm,
it's a decent idea to
stay inside of your car
because if lightning does hit it,
it's more likely to go around
the metal skin of the car
and not directly through
it and through you.
Keeping in mind everything we just learned
about the skin effect,
here's what I suggest.
Asgardian physiology, or at least Thor's,
turns his body into an
extremely good conductor
that creates a pronounced skin effect
when he's struck by lightning.
In other words, thanks to
Thor's Asgardian skin effect,
or TASE, almost no lightning
goes through his body
or his vital organs and
is rather routed around
his durable armor and
his ultra-tough skin,
like the chassis of a car, a
wide Australian handsome car.
If Asgardian skin can
protect Thor from lightning
with a god-like skin effect though,
the question still stands.
Why can you shock Thor?
We've said Taser a few times now,
so now let's evaluate the
standard handheld Taser
which is just the most popular name brand
for this kind of electrical weapon.
This weapon and others like
it are marketed as less lethal
because they are designed
to run electrical current
through muscles and nervous
systems to incapacitate humans.
Whether by prong or by shot barb,
Tasers and other electrical weapons
deliver tens of thousands
of volts of electricity
to their targets over
microsecond-long pulses.
Now, the lethality of Taser weapons
has been a very contentious
topic over the years,
and so, there are a number
of studies and papers
looking into the effects of
Tasers on the human body.
And I just happen to have found one
that answers our question almost exactly.
In 2005, professional
engineer James Ruggieri
published a report called
Lethality of Taser Weapons,
looking into claims
from Taser manufacturers
that when struck by a Taser,
targets would be protected
by a marked skin effect.
In other words, not all
of the Taser voltage
would go directly through the
body and into vital organs.
However, what James found
was that the frequency
from Taser strikes was over 100 times less
than would be needed to produce
a significant skin effect.
There would be no skin
effect from a Taser,
and so, Taser shocks can easily flow
through human biological tissue.
Applying all of this to our situation,
if a space Taser used
low frequency voltages,
like our own earthly Tasers do,
then it could theoretically get around
a possible Asgardian skin effect
that protected Thor from lightning strikes
and it could shock, shock
him with a space Taser.
So it doesn't all have to be as simple
as Thor's immune to all
electricity or he isn't.
He could just be resistant
to certain forms,
which opens him up to be both
the God of Thunder and shockable.
And we already know of real creatures
that are this complicated.
Electric eels which are
electric but not eels
are known for their ability to generate
large amounts of electricity
inside of their own bodies,
but they are likely not
immune to their own shocks.
If you were to look
inside the body of an eel,
you would find muscles
and a spinal cord, sure,
but you would also find
thousands of disc-shaped cells
called electrocytes running
along its entire body.
What these cells do is build up charge
inside and outside of them
with ions and with chemistry,
and then when the electric
eel wants to strike,
it charges these all at
once, releasing them,
and then that produces a
pretty hefty stacked charge
that can really mess up a fish.
But if the eels are being shocked,
they're obviously not being
shocked as much as their prey is
and that could have something
to do with insulating tissue,
the preference for the electric
shocks to go into the water
rather than into flesh,
and maybe the short
duration of the shocks.
Whatever it is, evolution has
prepared these electric eels
for a certain kind of shock but
not theoretically all shocks
kind of like we're assuming
Thor to be immune or not.
So in theory, you could still
electrocute an electric eel,
but don't try it because ethics.
I said, don't, I'm not gonna try it.
I said, I'm just gonna
slowly walk out here.
Oh you slimy beast.
And if you think about
who initially shocks Thor
in Thor: Ragnarok, things
make even more sense.
It is none other than a Valkyrie
who puts a shock collar
on the son of Odin,
and she would know his weaknesses,
his physiology, who he was.
So Thor might be immune to lightning,
but not to a Valkyrie
with inside knowledge
of how Asgardians work and a space Taser
that is high frequency, low voltage
and specifically designed to shock
big ol' beef muscles into submission.
Wow, that thing really
makes you Valhalla, huh?
Sorry, I love puns.
So, why isn't Thor immune to electricity?
Well, if we combine MCU
canon with a bit of physics,
we find a situation
where Thor can be immune
to some kinds of electrical discharges
like lightning with a suped
up Asgardian skin effect
but not others like a low
frequency space Taser.
I know this is all getting
kind of complicated,
but at least Thor's
electric susceptibilities
are easier to understand
than the Endgame timeline.
Because Science.
- And here's your hammer back.
- Thanks?
What?
There is a weird problem
if you are immune to lightning strike
but you want to be a big
ol' glistening MCU beef boy,
is that if you have a lot of moisture
on the outside of your body,
say you were standing in the rain
and you're hit by a
direct lightning strike,
we know that all of the moisture
on the outside of your body
can flash to steam and
blow your clothes off
and cause a lot of damage and
just be otherwise very bad.
So, since Thor and every
beef boy in the MCU
is always glistening, oiled up muscles,
a lot of moisture on it, maybe
in the rain looking all cool,
if then he summoned his lightning powers,
it would blow his clothes off,
which.
Thank you so much for watching, Glen.
If you want more of me, Because Science,
or you want to suggest
ideas for future episodes,
you can follow us here at
these social media handles
and go watch the first few
episodes of Because Space
and go watch the Science of Mortal Kombat
and have a great rest of your day.
