Don't let the title of this post scare you off. I am not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, so I couldn't even attempt to blog about quarks and carbon nanotubes, but when my girlfriend (who has a PhD in chemistry), bought us tickets to see 'James Kakalios: The Science of Superheroes' at the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was pretty excited to see something a little different.
James Kakalios is a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, who claims to have gotten his initial interest in science from reading comics as a kid. He is also known as 'The Hollywood Physicist', having consulted on Sam Raimi's Spiderman trilogy, and providing extra content on the Watchmen DVD.
He is a funny guy, and his 45 minute talk started off with lots of comics banter. He took some examples where comics such as Spider-man, Superman, and The Flash have covered basic scientific principles within their pages, and then he would either validate the science or completely shoot it down. It was all very simple to understand, covering things like why a thrown metal chair will not negate Electro's powers (hint: because it's not grounded), but then it got very, very complicated, and slightly off-point...
Kakalios said 'Let's suspend our disbelief for a moment, and forget that these super-beings could never exist, and let's look at how their powers would work if they could actually do these things'.
Ok, Jim, let's do that!
Unfortunately, we need to understand the basics of quantum mechanics and the Schroedinger equation before we get to that point, and trying to explain these 'basics' took up the remainder of the session. Personally, as someone who never took a real interest in physics at all, I was completely lost, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of the audience were too.
Kakalios fielded questions at the end of the session, one of which was about graphine and super-conductors, so I guess that particular audience member was pretty clued up, but I'm certain there were a lot of comic lovers in the room - not least the young kids wearing their favourite superhero t-shirts - who felt that it was not entirely clear from the beginning what we were paying to see. To clarify, Jim Kakalios is a very warm, fun guy, who is more than capable of speaking to an audience of comic book nerds and science nerds alike, but it's just a shame that this particular talk ultimately ended up feeling like a university lecture, because I'm pretty sure not a lot of people particularly enjoy those
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