Super Science
If MIT Physics Professor Max Tegmark had superpowers, he wouldn’t use them to fight villains, he’d go sightseeing.
“What if I had telescopic vision, like Power Girl or Hyperion?” Dr. Tegmark asked an audience attending a special screening of “Superman,” at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline.
“I’d gaze up into the sky,” he answered. And with a click of his mouse, a three-dimensional map of the universe was projected on the movie screen.
Dr. Tegmark spoke about the science of superheroes as part of Coolidge Corner Theater’s bi-annual series, “Science on Screen,” which concluded its spring run last night. Each movie is paired with a local scientist, who goes into detail about some of the scientific accuracies the films may leave out.
For “Superman,” Dr. Tegmark tried to figure out the density of the planet Krypton based on how high Superman can jump on Earth, about 660 feet. If the average person can jump 3 feet, then the gravitational pull of the planet Krypton is approximately 100 times that of Earth. Applying this information to Newton’s law of gravity, finds that Krypton must be about a million times denser than the planet Earth, and three times denser than the sun. “It seems like a very interesting place,” Dr. Tegmark said.
He also mentioned that a similar calculation is made in James Kakalios’s book “The Physics of Superheroes,” but is incorrect due to a mathematical error.
Dr. Tegmark’s talk then went into his area of study, astronomy, with a superhero twist. Aside from telescopic vision, his powers would also include teleportation – “to go for a ride in space,” the power to travel through worm holes, and time travel – to see the Big Bang of course.
The irony of the evening was that all of the sightseeing Dr. Tegmark may do with these powers, has already been simulated by the computers he works with. Each of his superhero abilities was illustrated with a virtual voyage through space, from the first billions of years after the Big Bang, to the future of our galaxy, the Milky Way. According to a simulation, three-to-four-billion years from now, it will merge with neighboring galaxy Andromeda.
Astronomers’ understanding of galaxies and stars, a.k.a the super large, is based on mathematics. They look into the past by simply plugging in numbers. “We start with what we know now and calculate backwards in time,” said Dr. Tegmark.
Even compared to X-men’s Wolverine or Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man,” the work of scientists is still super cool.
“Science on Screen” at The Coolidge Corner Theater will resume with a new lineup in September.
Photo from iStockPhoto.com.