The Avengers

Copernicus here. Longtime fans of AICN know that in addition to writing film reviews, I occasionally write articles about the science of movies. That’s because my not-so secret alter-ego is that of a professional astronomer at Las Cumbres Observatory and professor of astrophysics at University of California, Santa Barbara. I really care about how science is portrayed in movies, because scientific literacy is important to society, and for many of the students in my classes, their primary exposure to science is through the news and pop culture.

When I was younger I read all kinds of Marvel comics, including the Avengers, West Coast Avengers, Iron Man, Thor, etc. So I was just crazy-excited to see them on the big screen. And the result exceeded my expectations. Whedon knocked it out of the park, nailing the characters and delivering some of the best action scenes I’ve ever seen. But just as much credit is due to Kevin Feige, who has overseen the careful construction of a Marvel cinematic universe where it everything has been building to this. Superpowers have been handled with enough of a consistent and scientific tone that it isn’t jarring to see Thor and the same film with the technologically more grounded Iron Man.

Part of my goal in reviewing the science of THE AVENGERS is to point out all kinds of Easter eggs that the filmmakers threw in that keep the movie scientifically grounded. The point isn’t to nitpick over whether every little thing really could have happened. Obviously, in a movie about thunder gods and giant green monsters, we’re going to have to suspend our disbelief. Things like superpowers that were established in comic books are grandfathered in, in terms of plausibility. But it is still sometimes worth looking at the physics of some things in the film just to use it as a jumping-off point to teach some science. And even if you have to bend the rules underlying our universe to get some cool superheroes, and occasionally advance the plot, that’s fine with me. But if you get some science wrong for no good reason, that’s just lazy storytelling and it takes me right out of a film. In many films, with a little deeper understanding, the filmmakers could have done something even more spectacular.

This review got so long that I’ve had to split it into two parts. Here in part 1, I’ll cover the plot and technology in THE AVENGERS. In part 2, I cover the characters. There will be spoilers!

Dark Energy

Dark Energy gets a couple of nods in THE AVENGERS. Now this I know something about! I’ve spent many years of my life trying to figure this stuff out. Last year, my old boss, Saul Perlmutter, and two friends and colleagues of mine, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating universe — effectively for the discovery of Dark Energy. This was really the work of two teams, Perlmutter’s Supernova Cosmology Project (the one I joined in 2000), and Schmidt and Riess’ High-z Supernova Search team. And now, my most recent group, the Supernova Legacy Survey has the best measurements of the properties of the Dark Energy. I wrote a review paper on the subject for one of the Nature journals, which you can find here.

Right off the bat in THE AVENGERS, we are introduced to a facility called the Joint Dark Energy Mission. Ha! That’s a nod to a satellite concept many of my colleagues have spent years of their life developing. It is called Joint because it was a combined effort between NASA and the US Department of Energy. The idea was to use supernovae, weak lensing (the way galaxies distort light like a magnifying glass), and baryon acoustic oscillations (the imprint sound waves left on the early universe), to measure Dark Energy. I even wrote a white paper, with my colleagues from all over the world, arguing the need for such a mission to the panel reviewing all of astrophysics for 2010-2020. As a part of that review process, JDEM was selected as the top priority space mission for this decade in astrophysics, but it was redesigned into something called wFIRST. Since astronomers have effectively stopped using the JDEM name, I suppose the filmmakers thought that would make a good name for the institute where Dark Energy is being studied.

That was very cool to see, but then at the JDEM institute in THE AVENGERS they had tons of radio dishes! We don’t use radio telescopes to study Dark Energy. And they were too close to the building — we’d never put our sensitive electronics that close to tons of people with cell phones, wifi, etc., because of the interference. Observatories are usually out in the middle of nowhere, while the offices full of astronomers are in bigger cities (to attract the best talent). Still, I know why the filmmakers did it. When the whole complex starts to cave in, watching a field of radio telescopes go down is a lot more fun than a couple of telescope domes. But anything that causes an expert to roll their eyes just isn’t worth such a minor storytelling gain in my book. You want the experts geeking out, not groaning.

Dark Energy shows up again when Loki says to Thor something like, “The allfather must have had to expend a great deal of Dark Energy to get you here.” This refers to the fact that Dark Energy makes up about 74% of the mass-energy density of the universe, with Dark Matter making up about 22%, and normal matter, including basically everything you’ve ever heard of — planets, stars, galaxies, Hot Pockets, etc. — making up only 4%. We barely know what Dark Energy is, but apparently the more scientifically advanced Asgardians know a lot more about it, and can even manipulate it. The normal way Asgardians travel between realms, the wormhole-generating Bifrost, was destroyed in THOR. So that one-liner is a way of saying that Odin can still teleport Thor places, but at great cost. This explains why he hasn’t just used it to do some hammer time with Jane Foster.

But what is Dark Energy, and can you turn it into regular energy? To figure out what Dark Energy is, we make a map of the history of the expansion of the universe using supernovae to measure distances. If we rewind the expansion of the universe, in the early universe everything was closer together, so the gravitational attraction due to matter (both regular and dark) was more important. But as the universe expands, the amount of matter stays the same, but the volume of space goes up. So the density of matter in the universe is always falling. Strangely, Dark Energy doesn’t behave that way. Our group’s latest measurements show that the amount of Dark Energy in the universe increases over time, keeping pace with the expansion of the universe. Double the volume of the universe, and you double the amount of Dark Energy. That’s weird stuff! But the density of Dark Energy (the amount per volume) stays the same, in stark contrast to the behavior of matter. This means that the Dark Energy is probably a property of the vacuum of space itself. There’s actually no reason that the lowest energy quantum mechanical state of the vacuum has to be zero. However, as far as we know, tapping into this zero point energy is impossible.

But maybe the Asgardians know something we don’t. If we could extract Dark Energy from the vacuum, how much would we get? In one cubic meter of space, the amount of Dark Energy is very low — equivalent to the energy in a few atoms of hydrogen. But on Earth, in that same volume, there are 1025 molecules of oxygen and nitrogen! That’s one with 25 zeroes. So here normal energy dominates over Dark Energy by a factor of 10 septillion or so. That’s why you don’t feel the effects of Dark Energy on Earth — you can only feel its effect over enormous distances, where all those septillions of cubic meters add up. And you really need to get outside of galaxies, to the unimaginable voids between them, before Dark Energy starts summing up to something serious. Inside galaxies, gravity dominates over Dark Energy by a large margin. So my problem with Asgardians being able to tap into Dark Energy is not just that by all known physics it is impossible, it is that to get enough they’d have to be masters of intergalactic distances. That just makes them too powerful.

Verdict: Cool points for mentioning Dark Energy, because I get to talk about it. But have another throwaway energy source for Odin. And leave out the radio telescopes.

The Tesseract

It was awesome to see the Tesseract, aka the Cosmic Cube from the comics, show up as a MacGuffin in CAPTAIN AMERICA, in Howard Stark’s drawings in IRON MAN 2, in the post-credits sequence of THOR, and then be carried over as a major element of the plot in THE AVENGERS. In geometry, a tesseract is a four-dimensional hypercube. In the Marvel universe, the Cosmic Cubes (since there are now more than one), have had a long and crazy history, with powers ranging from warping reality to granting wishes. In THE AVENGERS it is mainly used as a source of energy and to open portals, but there are hints that something larger is going on.

To activate the Tesseract, there is line of dialogue about how the secret was heating it to (if I remember correctly) 100+ million Kelvin to “overcome the Coulomb barrier.” The Coulomb barrier is the electrostatic repulsion any two atomic nuclei have that keep them apart. You have to have enough energy to overcome this to force to get nuclei close enough together that the much more powerful (but short-ranged) strong force takes over, allowing a nuclear reaction like fusion. “Kelvin” is a measure of temperature (effectively equal to Celsius at these temperatures). Since temperature is a measure of the speed of a group of particles, a higher temperature means faster-moving, more energetic particles, fast enough to overcome the Coulomb barrier and slam together nuclei. So it sounds like the Tesseract is doing fusion! That was a nice bit of background in a throwaway line.

Except there’s one problem. The core of the Sun is 16 million Kelvin. A hundred million Kelvin would be insane to produce on Earth. For the TV show I co-hosted, Known Universe, I calculated what would happen if you put a piece of the core of the Sun the size of a suitcase in downtown LA. You can see my calculations here. Basically, it would be very similar to a nuclear bomb, and destroy the city. The Tesseract is smaller than a suitcase, but has a higher temperature, so the result would be pretty much the same. I guess it can somehow contain that temperature internally without exposing us to it.

They say the Tesseract emits gamma rays — this makes sense! Gamma rays are like X-rays, only shorter wavelength, and thus more energetic. In fact, they are the highest energy radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum. Everything emits radiation with the wavelength of the radiation inversely proportional to the object’s temperature. So the higher the temperature, the shorter wavelength radiation it emits. The Sun is about 10,000 degrees F at the surface, so it emits light in the visible part of the spectrum (in fact our eyes evolved to sense sunlight). More luminous stars emit primarily in the shorter-wavelength ultraviolet part of the spectrum. People are 98.6 deg F, so we emit light in the longer-wavelength infrared. That’s why when you turn off the lights people don’t glow in visible light, but they do glow in the IR. The tesseract has a phenomenal energy, so it would glow in gamma rays.

But if Banner is such a gamma-ray expert, he shouldn’t have told SHIELD to tell anyone with a spectrometer to put it on the roof to locate the Tesseract. Laboratory spectrometers won’t do shit for locating distant gamma rays. And no astronomers have gamma-ray spectrographs on Earth, because the atmosphere blocks gamma rays. We have to use satellites to look for them. In fact, the first cosmic gamma ray bursts were discovered by the military’s Vela satellites in 1967. They were looking for the gamma ray signatures of nuclear explosions on Earth which might be violating the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test-ban treaty. Today, how does the US pinpoint rogue nuclear explosions? Let’s just say that the GPS satellites do a lot more than locate your position. Banner should have told SHIELD to locate the cosmic cube with the X-ray detectors on GPS satellites. Anything that puts out gamma rays, puts out X-rays too.

Finally, there are hints in the movie that the Tesseract has a mind of its own. It won’t let humans shut it down. The characters under its influence say it revealed things to them. In the comics, at least once, the character of the Beyonder (effectively God), is said to be a Cosmic Cube that achieved sentience. It sounds absurd that an inanimate object could start thinking. But is it? After all, humans are in a way the consciousness of stars. We are made up of stuff created inside stars, but gathered back together in such a way that we have achieved sentience. We are a way for the universe to contemplate itself.

And as much as the 12 year old in me wants to see the Beyonder in a future movie, I’m sure that’s not where they’re going. God is a lame antagonist — see Star Trek 5. And he just doesn’t fit into the Marvel movie universe.

Verdict: Pretty awesome!

The Helicarrier

In the film, some of our heroes arrive on a seemingly nondescript aircraft carrier. But as any fan of the comics knows, SHIELD’s base of operations doesn’t just float — it can fly. As a Marvel fan, I loved seeing the Helicarrier realized on-screen, and its dramatic rise out of the ocean brought a little bit of wonder to what could have been just a boring set. But could we ever do this?

First, how much energy would it take to lift an aircraft carrier to the height of, say, a kilometer? From high school physics you might remember that the equation for potential energy is U=mgh, where m is mass, g is acceleration due to gravity (9.8 m/s2), and h is height. I’m not sure how much a Helicarrier weights, but a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier (which the movie Helicarrier was modeled on) weighs about 100,000 tons fully loaded, or 108 kg. Plugging in the numbers, we find that it would take about a trillion joules of energy to lift one a kilometer. Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered, so that they can go for 20 years without refueling. Their reactors generate about 200 megawatts at peak output. Since a watt is a joule per second, we can divide a trillion joules by 200 million joules per second to find that it would take an aircraft carrier about 5000 seconds to generate enough energy to lift it a kilometer, assuming it was using all of its energy to do that. Being able to stay hovering is another thing, but hey, that’s in the ballpark. Maybe the Helicarrier has more powerful reactors, is much lighter, or they’ve figured out how to get energy out of the Tesseract. On energetics, I give them a pass.

But the four engines of the Helicarrier look like pretty simple ducted fans. Could they generate enough thrust to lift it? Could anything? Thrust is a force. To make the carrier hover, we need to generate enough thrust to balance the force of gravity. We can calculate this from Newton’s second law: F=ma, where F is a force, m is mass, and a is acceleration. Here we use the acceleration due to gravity again, which is what we have to counterbalance. Plugging in the numbers, we get that we need a force (thrust) of about a billion Newtons. The world’s most powerful commercial jet engine (a turbofan, which is slightly different in design, but close enough), the GE90-115B on some versions of the Boeing 777, generates 569 kilo-Newtons of thrust. So would take a hell of a lot more than 4 of them to levitate an aircraft carrier — you’d need about 1700 such engines. If you were using the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters instead, you’d still need about 70 of them. This makes sense — an aircraft carrier is about 50 times heavier than a Space Shuttle.

So modern engines aren’t able to lift an aircraft carrier. But in the Marvel universe they’ve got crazy materials like adamantium and vibranium. Maybe their engines are way better. The filmmakers had a choice — they could have added a ton of engines to make the Helicarrier slightly more realistic to a few physicist nerds, or they could keep the classic design of the comics to appease the legions of comic book geeks. I think they made a wise choice! Besides, a lot of the drama depends on restarting one of the failed engines. That worked fairly well, if it did reek of the dreaded Whedon bespoke deathtrap (see Serenity).

Verdict: Minor science stretching for good storytelling is exactly what you should do as a writer.

Iron Strangelove

The climax of THE AVENGERS hinges on Iron Man having to dispose of a nuclear missile that he is told will detonate in one minute. The Black Widow holds off on closing a portal leaking aliens so that Iron Man can personally escort a missile through it. This is where THE AVENGERS fell a little flat for me — everything about this felt scripted.

The main problem is that timers aren’t the way air-to-surface nuclear missiles are detonated. I’m sure the exact manner is classified, but from the basic physics it isn’t that hard to figure out how it has to be done. Nuclear weapons generally aren’t triggered when they hit a target, they are detonated above a target in an airburst. This produces the most damage over the widest area. If you used a timer you’d have to know when the pilot was going to launch the missile, his position, the time it would take to get to its target, atmospheric conditions, etc. Instead you want to trigger the detonation when the missile reaches a specific height above the ground, and the best way to do that is to use either an altimeter, GPS, or a proximity fuze. Proximity fuzes have a fascinating history — the British invented the first one during WWII, and it changed the course of the war. They used the Doppler shift (the change in pitch you notice from a moving siren or train) to trigger an explosion as they approached a target. Since you could now hit a moving target, it allowed them to shoot down the V-1s that were bombing London with a much higher success rate, it severely crippled the effectiveness of Japanese Kamikaze attacks, and it helped the allies win the Battle of the Bulge. All from basic physics!

I’m fine with the whole idea of the nuclear missile — it served several purposes. It provided drama, a chance for Tony Stark to be a hero, and it wrapped up the battle with a bang. But shoehorning it in to the time bomb trope was unnecessary and took me out of the film. The missile provided enough drama. It could have detonated on contact with (or proximity to) the alien ship. Besides, we all knew there was going to be an Iron Man 3, so drama about whether or not he was going to die was just ineffective.

Verdict: Annoying to me, but not that bad in the scheme of things. I just like to bitch.

Minor technobabble

There are a few points in the script where some scientific sounding jargon is thrown around. One of the earliest bits of incidental science background concerns Loki’s quest for iridium. As they correctly explain in the film, iridium is used in the creation of antiprotons. You shoot protons at a target made of iridium, and sometimes you get out antiprotons — effectively antimatter. That’s a nice little detail, thrown in for all the particle physicists out there. What’s more, iridium is quite rare in the Earth’s crust, because it is so heavy it sank to the core of the Earth when it was molten. It’s actually not that rare in asteroids, which weren’t big enough to be melt. That’s why there is a layer of iridium all over the Earth in the layers of rock that are 65 million years old, at what is called the K-T boundary. It is from the asteroid impacts that killed most of the dinosaurs.

Iridium is one of the rarest elements on Earth, ten times rarer than platinum. Even so, you don’t need to raid Stuttgart to get it — you can just buy it for about $600 a troy ounce. Or since Asgardians are a spacefaring people, I’m sure it is much cheaper for them — Loki should have just brought some from home. Ahh, but when did supervillains ever eschew flamboyance for practicality? Besides, a big part of Loki’s plan was apparently to get captured.

So much for antiprotons. Antielectrons also show up in THE AVENGERS. When Tony Stark first meets Bruce Banner, he says says something like, “I enjoyed your theory on antielectron annihilation.” There’s one problem with that — physicists would almost always say “positron,” not “antielectron.” Also, the annihilation of a positron occurs when it meets its antimatter particle, a normal electron. So it would be equivalent to talk about his theory of “electron annihilation.” Still, none of what Tony Stark says is wrong, just a little strange. Interestingly enough, that process does give off a gamma ray — something Banner is an expert at. Maybe that was an insanely subtle physics joke.

Verdict: I love it when throwaway lines have extra meaning the more you know.

The Scientists

One of my favorite things about the Avengers is that it values science. Marvel has gone to great lengths to set up a scientifically plausible universe, and it pays off here, where Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk can exist side-by-side. And even more than that, scientists are an essential part of the plot. One of Loki’s first recruits is professor Erik Selvig, his key to managing a portal for his army. Meanwhile, Nick Fury first recruits Bruce Banner, and it is clear that he’s been relying on Tony Stark for years.

Just as important as whether THE AVENGERS got science right is whether they got scientists right. Most movie scientists are caricatures. I think it’s because writers don’t know how to write for scientists, directors don’t know how to direct them, and actors don’t know how to act them. Most writers just throw a bunch of jargon in their mouths, directors put them in a white lab coat, and the actors can’t sell the technobabble with confidence because they don’t know what it means, if it means anything.

THE AVENGERS did a great job though. Erik Selvig was a good representation of a scientist. He’s clearly curious about the universe, an expert at what he does, and was a good mentor to the younger researchers in THOR. Robert Downey Jr. is outstanding as Tony Stark — I can’t imagine anyone else in the role — but on the scientist credibility continuum, he leaves a bit to be desired (maybe it’s the absurdity of him building a particle accelerator in his basement). Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, though, is a revelation. Ruffalo not only is the best Banner, he does the best job at portraying a scientist of anyone in the Marvel universe. He’s skeptical, cerebral, listens to evidence, he’s motivated by things other than money, and he doesn’t feel the need to spout nonsense jargon like most other movie scientists. More than anything, there is a confidence in Ruffalo’s delivery and character that mirrors the authority with which most scientists speak. As a scientist you often get so specialized that you know you are one of the top experts in the world on a subject, and you know this because you know everyone in the field. It isn’t hard to be confident when you know you know as much as anyone else on the planet. Ruffalo plays a scientist as a real person — not a caricature. And there is an air of mystery about him — you always feel like he knows more than he’s telling you.

In fact, the special relationship between SHIELD and some of the world’s top scientists is handled well, and has parallels in the real world. Wars are won every bit as much by scientists as armies. During WWII, the US gathered together the top physicists to have them create a superweapon that would end the war. It was so successful, the system of national laboratories was established, effectively because the government decided it was great to have a bunch of smart people working on complicated problems. In the UK, during the war, people like Alan Turing helped to break the code of the German Enigma machines, allowing us to decode German plans. And I already mentioned the proximity fuze. The US still has a secretive group of top scientists, JASON, who meet every summer to advise the government.

Many scientists work on military programs because they think the cause is a good one, because the government offers them resources they would not otherwise have, because of the thrill of working together with other top minds, or because they are treated so well. Still, many scientists, who are often idealists at heart, are uneasy with this relationship, especially when politicians or the military lie or exploit the scientists. All these points of view are represented in THE AVENGERS. SHIELD has insane technology. Banner and Stark are just giddy working together. And there isn’t a better cause than saving the world. Even still, both SHIELD and the shady cabal running the show can’t resist keeping secrets from and manipulating the scientists, leading to bad blood.

Enough about scientists, let’s have some science fun with some of the characters. Sadly, Black Widow has no superpowers, so I’ll have to skip her.

Hawkeye

Apparently, Hawkeye is appropriately named. I don’t think they out-and-out say he eyes like Captain America has muscles, but you’d think so from his name and precision with an arrow. How good could his eyes be? 20/20 vision gives you the ability to resolve angles of about one arcminute (there are 60 arcminutes in a degree). For reference the moon is half a degree in diameter, so naked eyes can see about 30 “pixels” on the moon. Some people can do better — occasionally you hear about people with 20/10 vision — twice as good as a normal person. But that’s about the limit — your visual acuity is limited by how densely cones (color sensing cells) are packed on the fovea — the awesome part of your eye. They are only packed close enough to allow half-arcminute resolution in the best case. Incidentally, hawks can see details eight times finer than humans.

Captain America

Captain America is essentially a steroid-enhanced human, so he’s not that interesting, scientifically. But his shield is. It is made of vibranium, a Marvel universe material that is supposed to absorb and redirect all kinetic energy. He demonstrates this when Thor tries to go hammer-time on his shield and ends up smiting himself.

Could we make such a shield? Well, there are some materials that do funky things when you put pressure on them. A mixture of cornstarch and water (called oobleck, in a name stolen from Dr. Seuss!) acts like a liquid normally, but if smack it, it temporarily become solid. Regular readers of the site might remember this scene from Known Universe, where I used this trick to walk on a dumpster full of this stuff.

Ice can also take on many different forms depending on its temperature and pressure. Kurt Vonnegut fans may be familiar with Ice-9. His form of it is fictional, but there are actually at least 15 forms of ice structure, giving the ice different properties depending on the pressure.

We don’t have something like Cap’s shield yet, but the idea of using kinetic energy to change the molecular structure of something isn’t insane. The problem I have is that Cap’s shield only does this selectively — when he throws it at someone, it doesn’t absorb energy at all. Maybe it behaves differently when hit from the side.

The Hulk

Gamma rays will fuck you up — they damage whatever cells they come into contact with. In the real world this can give you cancer. Tony Stark was right when he said that the gamma ray dose Banner took should have killed him. Maybe Banner is a secretly a mutant with tough cells. But the Marvel universe, when gamma rays don’t kill you, they turn you into something big, green, and nasty.

Then again, maybe the gamma rays caused a mutation. In real-life it is possible to have a mutation that gives you massive muscles. Normally, our bodies produce myostatin, a protein that inhibits muscle growth. Fortunately, we (and animals), have two copies of the gene the regulates this. But some real-life mutants lack it completely, and as a result they have runaway muscle development. Take this whippet:

Sorry Ang Lee haters, there are Hulk dogs in real life! Some people have this Hulkish condition too. There’s a bit more about this in io9’s show on the Science of the Avengers.

This doesn’t explain why the Hulk is green, how he transforms when he’s angry, where he gets the mass from, or how he keeps getting stronger the angrier he gets, but we don’t have to explain that. The Hulk is awesome.

Iron Man

I happened to be watching the Avengers for the first time with my buddy and colleague, Ben Mazin. In addition to being a physicist, Ben is an international arms dealer. I’m serious. And, no surprise, he loves the hell out of Iron Man. Ben invented something called Jetboots, which propel you pretty quickly underwater, and then sold them to militaries. He then tried to pitch DARPA on an underwater version of a suit of armor using Jetboots, inspired by Iron Man, but they didn’t go for it. So when we first see Iron Man *under freakin’ water* in THE AVENGERS, Ben nearly lost his shit. At the bar later, he explained that much of the Iron Man tech is either here today or close to reality. There are already powered exoskeletons. The only real problem to creating an Iron Man is the power source.

Just how awesome is that arc reactor anyway? We can actually get an idea from the movie. When Iron Man offends the delicate sensibilities of certain preening man-god he gets himself (sing it with me), “Thun-der-struck!” Apparently the only bolts from the blue he’s received before are ideas, because he’s kind of surprised that the bolt didn’t fry him. I thought he’s supposed to be some kind of super-genius. He shouldn’t have been phased at all. Iron Man’s suit is made of metal, so it conducts electricity. The electric field inside a conductor is zero — he’s in a Faraday cage, so he can’t be shocked. Don’t believe me? Watch these guys, ArcAttack, not just wearing chain mail, not just playing guitar in friggin’ chain mail, but rocking the fuck out while being hit by lightning while playing guitar in chain mail! And it gets even crazier. They are using the Tesla coil to make the music! And the music is Iron Man! I just recursively blew my own mind.

Incidentally, they also play music worthy of a Sith Lord.

Interestingly enough, Thor’s bolt actually charged Iron Man’s suit to “400% capacity.” Ooh, ooh, we can use this to figure out how much energy Iron Man’s suit holds! We all know how much power is in a lightning bolt, right? 1.21 Gigawatts! That actually isn’t too far off, but it doesn’t make sense to talk about lightning in terms of power, which is energy per time, since a lightning bolt is so quick. But the total energy release in a lightning bolt is about a gigajoule (a billion joules). That’s about as much energy as is in a tank of gasoline. Doesn’t sound like much, but cars have a hell of a lot of kinetic energy. And they only use about 15% of the energy — most of the rest is wasted. Still, I would have thought that the arc reactor would give you more than a quarter tank of gas. Maybe Thor hit him with an insanely powerful bolt of lightning.

I’m paraphrasing, but some character says to Tony Stark, “Since when did you become a thermonuclear astrophysicist.” He says something like, “since last night.” Since my area of expertise is thermonuclear supernovae, I guess that makes me, in the parlance of the Marvel universe, a “thermonuclear astrophysicist.” It took me 4 years as an undergraduate, 5 years of graduate school, plus many years as a postdoc to master the subject. As a by-product of my job, I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of the smartest people on the planet. I don’t know anyone who could master a field in one day. Then again, we know how Tony Stark likes to brag. He isn’t being entirely honest — since he perfected the Arc reactor, he was actually already an expert at thermonuclear fusion.

Thor

I’ve already written an article on the Science of THOR. The Asgardians are basically an alien race in the Marvel universe, and I think that’s pretty awesome. But I’d still like to see a scene where Banner and Stark are arguing over some advanced physics, and Thor just corrects them. Come on, that’s comedy gold! (It reminds me of one of my favorite Onion articles.) Even though he seems like a brute, even the stuff he learned in elementary school has to be way beyond Earth science. I don’t understand why Banner and Stark aren’t quizzing him nonstop.

Thor’s semi-magical nature from the comics did bring up an interesting discussion at the bar after the film about whether magic has any place in the cinematic Marvel universe. We physicists said not just no, but hell no. The reason is, that if something like “magic” showed up, scientists would figure it out. If you could utter a spell, and, say, teleport, just about every physicist in the world would drop what they are doing and study that. You just have to say these words!?! Awesome!

The point is, there is nothing “mystical” that is off-limits to science. Science would just absorb it, and then it would be something we understand. It would be no less awesome, it would just move from the “magic” column into the “understood” column. Don’t believe me? We now know how to fly. We can build robots. We can transmute elements. We can make things invisible. We can levitate things. We can see back in time to the origin of the universe. We can explode cities. We can even teleport photons. So we can do “magic,” only it is now called science.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’d put it the other way around. Calling something “magic” is just a statement about our ignorance.

That’s it. As you can tell, I’m a big fan of the Avengers. It was entertaining, but it gave me plenty to think about too. I love the universe they set up, and I hope they keep talking to scientists to “keep it real.”