You've been taking bullets,
charging it up with kinetic energy.
You turned off the artificial
gravity everywhere but in here.
It's quantum entanglement between
the quantum states of Posner
molecules in your brains.
Do you guys just put the word
quantum in front of everything?
I gotta say, we do put the word
"quantum" in front of everything.
Hi, I'm Jim Kakalios.
I'm a physics professor at
the University of Minnesota
and the author of "The
Physics of Superheroes."
Woo, let's go!
That's a scene from the first
"Guardians of the Galaxy"
movie, and as they're
making their jailbreak,
Rocket turns off the artificial
gravity in the space station
so that everyone else floats
and is unable to get their
bearings, and they make their escape.
I told you I had a plan.
Say you're in an elevator, and
in the worst-case scenario,
the cables break, and
you start free falling.
You're no longer feeling
the effects of gravity.
It's as if you're weightless.
You could start doing
magic tricks to the other
people in the elevator, say,
"Hey, look at this pipe"
and let go of the pipe, and
it would just float there
because it's falling, you're
falling all at the same rate.
But if you're already
standing on the floor,
you'd stay standing on the floor.
However, anyone who was
walking at the moment
they were walking, they were
pressing their feet down
on the ground and then
lifting their feet up.
And at that moment, if the
gravity was turned off,
they would have launched themselves up,
and without gravity to slow their ascent,
they would keep rising in that way.
So the people who were stationary
and started to float up, not so much.
Anyone who was walking would
indeed start to float up.
I'm not quite sure how
the artificial gravity
is being generated in the space station,
and the whole notion of artificial gravity
that can be turned on and
off at will in generalized
locations in the space
station, that's a bit too far.
Talking raccoons, that part's OK.
Huh?
My undying fidelity.
Jim: So Thanos has just acquired
the Space Infinity Stone,
and as soon as he has
this, he's able to stop
Loki's dagger thrust in midair.
Undying, you should choose
your words more carefully.
Well, there's actually some
real physics behind this.
Back in the beginning of the 20th century,
Emmy Noether was able
to show a deep, intimate
connection between space and momentum.
Controlling the Space Stone not only
allows you to teleport but apparently also
gives you command over momentum.
Loki's dagger thrust is arrested,
and all of the momentum is stopped.
If you look closely around Loki's arm,
you see a little blue
glow that's coming from
the Space Stone that's arresting
the momentum of his thrust.
It's worth noting that
in "Captain America: The First Avenger,"
the Space Stone, which was
embedded in the Tesseract
at the time, is the only Infinity Stone
that was actually
weaponized by Hydra and used
to create force beams, thereby
showing that there is indeed
a connection between space and momentum.
The first "Iron Man" movie, 2008, the one
that started the whole Marvel universe.
I love it, Tony Stark,
the superhero as engineer
and the engineer as superhero.
When he built his first suit
in a cave
out of scraps,
it was made of iron and was very heavy,
about 150 pounds
just counting the iron,
not counting the weaponry.
Then he developed the Mark
II, which was titanium.
Titanium is lighter than iron and strong.
And then in order to
combat the icing problem,
he used a gold-titanium alloy.
Let's connect to the
cisco, have it reconfigure
the shell metals, use
the gold-titanium alloy
from the Seraphim Tactical Satellite.
That should ensure fuselage integrity
while maintaining
power-to-weight ratio, got it?
Now there are gold-titanium alloys.
They tend to be very brittle.
They're used in dental
applications more than anything else.
So unless he's fighting
crime boss Gingivitis,
I don't think that he really would
want to use a gold-titanium alloy.
So much of the technology
except for the arc reactor
are things that we
actually have right now.
We have exoskeletons. We
have plating. We even have
jet boots. The one thing we
don't have is a power supply.
He has an arc reactor
that's about the size
of a hockey puck and puts out the power
of three nuclear power plants.
If we knew how to do that,
we wouldn't need superheroes
because otherwise you'd
have an Iron Man suit,
but you'd have to drag a long
extension cord behind you
in order to have enough
power for the suit.
One thing that's realistic in this
is that we never see him,
when he engages his boots
or shoots a repulsor ray, we
never see him press a button
or give a voice command. He
thinks it, and it happens.
That's because he has a cybernetic helmet
that picks up his thought waves and sends
the information to the suit. This is real.
Scientists and engineers at
the University of Minnesota
and at other universities and
institutions around the world
are developing cybernetic helmets
that pick up the very weak
radio waves that are generated
when we think, amplifying
them, sending them via
Bluetooth to another device.
They're trying to develop
prosthetics and treat paralysis,
but if you had asked me
as kid when I was reading
"Iron Man" comics which
part in the 21st century
would be the closest to reality,
the last thing I would have
said was the cybernetic helmet.
Why don't you pick on
someone your own size?
Ant-Man shrinking down to the size
of an ant, even much smaller.
When Ant-Man shrinks, he's
also able to control his mass,
and he shrinks at constant density,
so he's very lightweight.
When he rides on an ant,
for example, he doesn't
smush the ant, but when he
wants to punch Yellowjacket,
he's able to increase his
mass so there's more force,
more momentum behind his punch.
How does he do it?
In the comics and in the
movie, via Pym particles
that were discovered by Hank Pym.
If they had just given a
little bit of lip service
to how one changes the size of atoms.
They say that they're
changing the spacing between
the atoms or the space in the atoms, no.
The size of an atom is determined
via quantum mechanics to
be the ratio of several
fundamental constants:
charge of an electron,
mass of an electron, Planck's constant.
If, via the Pym field, to
adjust, say, the magnitude
of Planck's constant,
make it 10 times smaller,
then the atoms would
become 100 times smaller,
and the size of an object
would shrink uniformly.
If you make it 10 times
bigger, the size of the atoms
would be 100 times bigger,
you could become Giant-Man.
It's Spider-Man.
Oh, my God, this is it.
Tell everyone to hang on.
Oh yeah, I see that look in class a lot.
So here, Peter Parker, Spider-Man, needs
to stop a runaway elevated train.
He shoots out multiple web lines,
they stretch a great deal,
but they don't break,
and he's able to stop the
train just in the nick of time.
How strong does the webbing
have to be for this to work?
We can look up the mass of a train.
We can estimate its
initial velocity by seeing
how long it takes to pass city blocks.
We can look at the distance over which
the webbing stretches. We
can estimate its diameter.
We can count the number of web lines,
and we come up with a tensile
strength for the webbing
that has to be about 1,000 megapascals,
which is equivalent to 145,000
pounds per square inch.
But real spider silk has a tensile
strength of 1,200 megapascals.
If Spider-Man's webbing
is anywhere as strong
as real spider silk, then
this indeed could happen.
He's shooting it out of his
wrists, which is not what
a real spider would do, but
we'll just leave that aside.
"Doctor Strange" is a
deviation from all the other
Marvel movies, insofar as everything else
in the Marvel Cinematic
Universe up till then
had some sort of hand-wavy,
super-science-type explanation.
But here they're just
going for full-on magic.
Stephen: This doesn't make any sense.
Ancient One: Not everything
does, not everything has to.
Jim: The notion that there
are multiple dimensions
is an idea
that has been taken seriously
by at least some physicists.
Ancient One: What if I told you
the reality you know is one of many?
Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics
that describes the properties of atoms
and how they interact with light.
One aspect of quantum
mechanics that many scientists
find troubling is that it
only deals with probabilities.
So you can calculate the
probability of a measurement,
giving the electron at a
certain location in space
and time, but not exactly
where that electron will be.
One alternative explanation
is that there are actually
an infinite number of parallel universes.
You find the electron in
one location, but in other
universes, it might be at
some different location.
So presumably, maybe
Doctor Strange is visiting
some of these parallel
Earths that have undergone
significant quantum
deviations from our own.
As far as the science
there, even if they're
in a parallel Earth, the
fact that their antagonists
are able to affect the
orientation of gravity
locally, I'm sorry, that's just magic.
But he's the master of the mystic arts,
so I'll give him a break.
Now, I don't know what
you plan on doing here.
I've come here to put an
end to Loki's schemes.
Then prove it. Put that hammer down.
Uh, yeah, no. Bad call. He loves his...
You want me to put the hammer down?
Thor puts the hammer down
on Captain America's shield.
In the movies, the shield
is made of pure vibranium,
where in the comics it's an
alloy of steel and vibranium.
That's actually more realistic.
You want steel to provide
strength and rigidity so that
when Captain America throws
his mighty shield, it will
ricochet, but you want the
vibranium because it absorbs
all vibrations, making it
the perfect shock absorber,
as it's absorbing Thor's
hammer blow in this scene.
It's completely vibration-absorbent.
Jim: Energy can't be destroyed. It can
only be converted to another form.
The energy of the hammer
strike is converted into
sound waves in the hammer,
and if the vibranium
absorbs it, what form does it take?
What we see from the clip:
It's converted into blue
light, ultraviolet light,
this enormous flash of
light that's given off.
It's showing that the
vibranium is actually
a perfect sonoluminescent material.
"Sono" meaning sound,
"luminescent" meaning light.
You send sound waves in,
and you get light out.
This is a real phenomena in physics.
The only real difference is that
vibranium unfortunately doesn't exist.
You're linked to Janet.
It's quantum entanglement
between the quantum
states of Posner molecules in your brains.
Do you guys just put the word
quantum in front of everything?
This is a classic example of
quantum mumbo-jumbo.
There are some real words
and real concepts that
were used there, but they're
used in a context, or
in connection with other phrases,
that I just cannot follow.
But quantum entanglement is a real thing.
If you bring two objects so close together
that their quantum-wave functions overlap,
then they can only be
described as a single
two-object quantum-wave function.
And if I bring them very
far apart, and I don't
disentangle them, then
they remain connected.
So something that's done on this end
shows up in the other end
even though they could be
on opposite ends of the
Earth or opposite ends
of the solar system, they would still be
communicating to each
other because they're still
described by one single wave function.
Scientists are using this property
of entangled quantum states to try and see
if they can develop superior computers.
They're trying to make the context
for a character in the movie "Ghost"
who is quantum-mechanically tunneling
through solid objects, a real phenomena,
but the way they're doing it
just doesn't really make sense.
A little bit too much quantum woo.
So I'd say less woo, more quantum.
I'm not going to make it.
Black Panther: Keep going.
So here we see the Black Panther
and his sister, scientific genius Shuri.
She's using a holographically generated
car in Wakanda to steer
a car the Black Panther
has commandeered in South Korea.
Which side of the road is it?
Black Panther: For
Bast's sake, just drive.
OK, calm down.
What makes Wakanda special is that its
near-inexhaustible supply of Vibranium,
an extraterrestrial mineral that has
the ability to absorb all vibrations.
The hard-light hologram
always used to bother me.
Holograms are interference
patterns created with light.
The hologram itself is
not an actual object,
it is an image. But I
thought about it some more.
Using sound, you can create regions that
have a pressure and exert a force
as if they were a solid object.
And presumably, if you overlaid that with
a optical hologram, you
would have something that
feels solid but is generated via light.
Presumably using their
command of vibranium,
Shuri is able to do this and overlay it
with an optical hologram,
which has no solidity
but still produces a visual
image for her to interact with.
I don't know if I could
create a interference sound
pattern overlaid with a hologram to create
a hard-light object,
but "Shuri" someone can.
You show-off.
Surprising absolutely no one,
here we see Carol Danvers, Captain Marvel,
showing up in "Avengers: Endgame,"
obviously responding to
the SOS call sent out
by Nick Fury at the end of
"Avengers: Infinity War."
We last saw her in the
mid-1990s at the end
of her own movie, "Captain
Marvel," where she took off
into outer space to try to
find the Skrulls' home world.
She comes back to Earth
24, 25 years later,
doesn't appear to be any older.
Einstein's special
theory of relativity says
that all observers, whether
stationary or moving,
have to agree on the value
of the speed of light.
For that to be the
case, they will disagree
about distances and disagree about times.
There's an effect called time dilation
that if someone is moving very close
to the speed of light,
to a stationary observer,
time will appear to
have been moving slower.
Say she spends six months
traveling close to, but not at,
the speed of light, then
six months traveling at this
velocity would correspond to
24 years passing on Earth.
We don't know what's going to
happen in "Captain Marvel 2,"
but if any of it involves
traveling near the speed of light,
then the time-dilation
effect could easily account
for the fact that she
doesn't appear to have aged
significantly from the last movie.
This has been Jim Kakalios, your friendly
neighborhood physics
professor, and in the words
of the legendary Stan Lee,
"Face front, true believer."
What's the matter with you kids?
You never seen a spaceship before?
Bring 'em over here, and
hold on for safekeeping.
That is hilarious!
