Marvel.com Blogs - Blah Blah Blog by Tom Brevoort

web marvel.com

BLOGS HOME|COMIC BLOGS|VIDEO GAME BLOGS|OTHER BLOGS|MARVEL NEWS

Strange Mails
2007-01-05 08:47:45

The week has taken an ugly term in terms of workload, which is why this blog entry is a bit late--hopefully, I'll manage to get another one up before the end of the day, and mantain a "one-a-day" output, even if they all tend to jam up at the end of the week.

Every day, we get a lot of e-mail from fans and readers about our books. And it's all greatly appreciated--regardless of the content, the fact that somebody is affected enough by the stuff we're producing to take five minutes and send us off a note. Some of it is priase, some of it is anger--and then, there are other communications that defy easy classification, where the letter-writer has a point that's of specific interest to them. These letters aren't bad--they're just kinda strange.

So here's today's Strange Letter From The Mailbag:

I'm sorry, but Carol would only need to exert a force similiar to benching
12.7 tons to have stopped the car. You failed to do proper dimensional analysis when doing your calculations, mainly be completely ignoring units and what they even mean. Your first mistake was taking kilograms and multiplying that by miles per hour. If you're going to do the problem in metric, do it in all metric units. The units in momentum would be kg*m/s which makes perfect sense. By the equation printed. You have a mass times a velocity. Mass is kilograms and velocity should be meters per second.
This is dimensional analysis. I'm going to solve the same problem two different ways now. The way I would solve it and your way with correct units.
My way:
The acceleration is 90mph in .5 seconds. 90mph is approximately 40m/s.
Force=mass*acceleration. The acceleration is (40m/s)/.5 = 80m/s. So F=1550kg*80m/s. This equals 124,000 Newtons (I'm ignoring significant figures for simplicity). Just for reference a Newton is kg*m/s^2. You used it as if it was kg*miles/(hour*seconds) which is not correct. So for Carol to have to deal with 124000 Newtons it would be similiar to her benching
12.7 tons. This is found with Force=mass*acceleration, only modifed with mass=Force/acceleration. In this case the acceleration is 9.8m/s as that is what she would have to cope with when bench pressing. So 124,000 N/9.8m/s=12,700kg. And since 1kg=.001 ton then it is 12.7 tons.

Your way, only with correct units:
momentum = mass * velocity. p=1550kg*40m/s. p=62000kg*m/s. Also note that p = momentum. Yes it doesn't seem to make sense but this isn't a physics history lesson. So then we take 62000kg*m/s and divide that by .5s to get the impulse which = 124,000 N. From there you should be able to understand how to convert it to 12.7 tons by the previous example.

Carol would only have to withstand a force similar to 12.7 tons and for a person than can bench 50 tons, 12.7 is nothing. By comparison. If you could only bench 150lbs it would be like having to bench 38lbs. Which would not be hard at all. A more direct comparison would be trying to catch something that weighs 4.68lbs going 90mph. This would hurt, a lot. It may injure you. To give you credit, this comparison would show that Carol was probably trying to avoid a little pain trying to catch the car, especially with it moving so fast. To explain catching the armored truck with ease in issue #1. It was only falling with gravity. It did not have very much horizontal velocity. It had some, but most of it's force was in the vertical plane.

Well, this is probably too long to print, but butcher it however you want or don't print it at all. Sometimes you need a little bit more than google.

-Derek

More later.

Tom B

This guy....
Seriously, not only was his letter useless, he was rude for no reason.

And you never need more than google.

Posted by Inferno78 on 2007-01-05 13:43:52

...
That is weird in its purest form O_O

Posted by NiCKLESS on 2007-01-06 05:09:27

huh, kinda neat
Obviously a mathmetician-type who reads comic books. Now that's a scary thought. He did have a point, although I do think he was a LITTLE extreme in his explanation.
Oh, and that letter was NOT useless, just because you can't understand it. It wasn't even all that rude either. I don't see what your problem is.
I'd LOVE to see what other oddities you guys have gotten in!

Posted by Dragonchaos on 2007-01-07 02:39:02

hm, interesting
Nah, sounds pretty reasonable to me. He DID go a little to the extreme, though. I think he only *needed* to do one example. Makes a certain amount of sense though. Personally it wasn't useless, and he wasn't being very rude, either. A little peeved, maybe, but not rude.

Posted by Dragonchaos on 2007-01-07 17:56:06

Makes sense.
his point makes sense, but just to remind everyone. these are only comics and aren't always gonna be scientifically correct.
the fact thats its about a person lifting a vehicle proves it. these guys aren't scientist, they're artists.

Posted by heatstriker on 2007-01-08 19:13:43

That was awesome. I will buy that issue of Warbird if you print this letter (well, I was going to buy it anyway if it's printed in one of the Arachne issues, but still). I'm cracking up.

Now I'm tempted to write about the misplaced clause in the Ant-Man recap page (which had Hydra being shrunk down and running around the SHIELD helicarrier, much to my amusement). : )

Posted by motteditor on 2007-01-09 16:22:02

what now?
Hey, weren't there going to be more of these? Are they somewhere else, or what? Or is your workload just catching you off guard.

Posted by Dragonchaos on 2007-01-10 03:49:59

hmm a geek at work ?

Posted by Victorvndoom on 2007-01-12 13:55:41

Array

Enter a response to this blog post:

About this blog:
Ramblings and musings from the mind of Tom Brevoort. "It won’t be clean. It won’t be fun. It mostly won’t be coherent."

About the author:
Tom Brevoort is Executive Editor for Marvel Comics, and oversees such titles as New Avengers, Civil War, and Fantastic Four.


save this link

More entries by this author:
One last... (2009-01-04) (5 responses)
It seems... (2009-01-01) (10 responses)
It's great... (2008-12-31) (2 responses)
Well,... (2008-12-30) (2 responses)
It's a very... (2008-12-28) (3 responses)