Superhero Science

This holidays at Science Space, we’re turning our centre into a celebration of all things Superhero!

To celebrate, I’ve been working on a new show - the Superhero Science Show (I know… we really worked long and hard on that title…).

It’s basically all about whether or not superheroes would be able to do the things they do if they had to follow the laws of physics. I mean, the short answer is “hell no” but the long answer is a lot more fun.

To give you an example, I literally spent an entire afternoon one day with my calculator and one of my favourite Marvel characters of all time: Storm.

Storm controls the weather, which is already pretty amazing, but for our purposes she also manages to conjure lightning out of nothing.

That might work in her fictional universe, but what about ours?

Well disregarding the complications of electrifying the atmosphere, if we think about the law of conservation of energy, Storm needs to have enough energy to transform into lightning. That means she’ll need to eat a certain number of calories.

Calculating that number is weirdly difficult. No one really seems to know just how much energy is in a single lightning bolt. I’ve used a number from a ScienceAlert article; 15 Mega Joules.

The average human needs to consume 2500 calories to function normally so Storm would need to consume an additional 15 MJ on top of that.

I’ll spare you the conversions but the number you get is astronomically huge.

If Storm wanted to conjure a SINGLE bolt of lightning, she’d need to eat 6,372 Big Macs or 11,840 cheeseburgers or 26,379 Weetbix (how many do you do?) or, my personal favourite, 40,308 bananas.

And that’s just in a day.

I did some more digging. The current record for most bananas peeled and eaten in a minute (because of course that’s a thing) is 8 bananas per minute. So if Storm wanted to eat 40,308 of them, she’d be eating for 3.5 days.

PLUS 40,308 bananas adds up to your total year’s dosage of background radiation… not ideal.

So yeah… she’s pretty fictional.

Also my job is weird but amazing.

Science Space is a not-for-profit organisation at the University of Wollongong. All work presented here is my own, created while employed as an Experience Officer.