Physics Of Superheroes

James Kakalios is a distinguished professor in the school of physics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota. He created a freshman seminar course that combined his love for physics with his love for comic books and called it, appropriately enough, Everything I Know About Science I Learned from Reading Comic Books.

Because of its popularity with his students, he was inspired to write The Physics of Superheroes. It is a book for the general reader that covers all of the basic concepts in a first-year college physics course in an often humorous fashion and uses comic book superheroes as examples. Among other things, Kakalios uses basic physical principles to show that the Flash must be surrounded by a pocket of air when he runs that enables him to breathe and that gravity must have been 15 times greater on Krypton than it is on Earth. Kakalios refers to Iron Man, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and the X-Men, among others, to cover concepts such as thermodynamics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and string theory.

He says that he has been reading comic books longer than he has been studying physics.