Though not everything seen in comic books today is true, Professor James Kakalios from the University of Minnesota proved last night that sometimes comic books do get the science right.
Around 40 people were in attendance at "The Uncanny Physics of Superhero Comic Books" presentation last night in Watson Forum. Kakalios showed audience members that through the use and understanding of physics, certain super-powers could become realities.
"I am simultaneously a geek and a nerd," Kakalios said. "I read comic books as a kid, and then I picked them up again in graduate school as a hobby while dealing with the stress of my dissertation research and I kept up with it."
After re-discovering comics books in graduate school, Kakalios was inspired to use superheroes in his own teaching. In 2001, he began a freshman seminar class at the University of Minnesota titled, "Everything I Know About Science I Learned From Reading Comic Books."
"I thought, well, let me just create a whole class that was a real physics class that talked about real physics by using the illustrations that come from superhero comic books," he said.
In his lecture, Kakalios discussed Einstein's principle, the Bernulli Effect and Newton's Third Law of Motion. He tied these scientific principles to the powers held by comic book superheroes and super villains, including Spiderman, Superman, Magneto and The Flash.
The audience was varied in age and interest, with some required to attend for a first-year seminar and others driven only by their desire to learn more about real-world physics in relation to the not-so-real world of comic books.
Sophomore Omar Abdel-Rahim was part of the latter.
"[I came] because I love science and comic books. I liked the humor and simple explanations of physics that he gave," he said.
Professor of computer science Scott Thede agreed that the lecture placed the topic of physics in an interesting new light.
"I really like superheroes, it was interesting to see how the physics topic related to the superhero stuff," Thede said.
Kakalios has published two books on the subject of science and superheroes, "The Physics of Superheroes," published in 2005, and "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics" in 2010.
He has also had articles discussing his work published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Various other media outlets have also contacted him about the physics of superheroes, including the BBC and the Associated Press.