Creators of ‘Watchmen’ interact with college physics professor
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BY DAVID ZIZZO Comments 1
Published: March 10, 2009

James Kakalios teaches the course, "Everything I Know About Physics I Learned by Reading Comic Books” at the University of Minnesota. Photo Provided

James Kakalios speaks fluent "geek,” which could be why the creators of the "Watchmen” movie wanted to hear what he had to say.

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"They’re all geeks,” said Kakalios, who served as a science consultant for the filmmakers. "What are geeks? Geeks are people who are turned on by ideas.”

Actually, Kakalios is quite the geek himself. As a physics professor at the University of Minnesota, Kakalios is stoked about how the world works, and he wants others to be, too. Still, he knows many young people can be scared off with all that physics talk about mass/force/velocity and Newton’s first law of blah blah.

Make no mistake, Kakalios is a serious scientist whose research could lead to new materials for solar cells and advances in neuroscience and brain treatment. But when he talks to students in his popular freshman seminar, he talks superheroes. The course, "Everything I Know About Physics I Learned by Reading Comic Books,” is a hit with everyone from future engineers to drama majors.

"They see a class about the physics of superheroes and they say, ‘How hard can that be?’” Kakalios said.

In the course, Kakalios doesn’t play Professor Grump or Doctor No, trying to debunk all the fantastic abilities the characters exhibit. As he puts it, there’s no "What’s the deal with the Hulk’s pants anyway?” inquisition. Instead, in his classroom, he grants each character "a one-time miracle exemption from the laws of nature.”

OK, so you’re superstrong or you can stretch like a rubber band. Or, like The Flash, you can run at super speed. Then Kakalios asks questions physics can address. "Could you run across the ocean, or up the side of a building? Could you catch bullets in midair?” If Superman gets his ability to leap because he came from a planet with higher gravitational pull, how large would Krypton have to be? Turns out nature could create a planet that size, Kakalios figures, but "it’s hard to keep it from exploding.”

"What I’m trying to do is explain physics principles,” he said. "The students get to see that it’s not just this artificial thing and a bunch of equations ... and sines and cosines and all that nonsense.”

Kakalios has become a favorite at geek gatherings, such as a comic book convention in San Diego last summer, where he presented "The Science of Watchmen, or Why So Blue, Dr. Manhattan?” He told attendees he had 10 minutes to teach them quantum mechanics, "which gives me a problem: What do I do with the other eight?” Learning quantum mechanics requires the acceptance of fantastic things, he said, and "this is the perfect audience.”

Comic or "graphic novel” superheroes also present perfect examples of fantastic things to probe, he figures. Kakalios’ first injection of comics into academia involved a scientific analysis of sorts he performed on an incident that rocked the comic world: when Spider-Man tried to rescue his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, after she fell from a bridge. The heroine died despite Spider-Man snagging her with a web before she hit the ground.

Kakalios calculated Gwen would have been moving at 95 mph when she hit the web and the impact force of 10 to 20 times gravity was sufficient to snap her neck. Kakalios also was asked by comic artist Gail Simone what the world would look like for her atom-sized superhero "The Atom.” He’d need special goggles to see x-rays, since light doesn’t bounce off atoms and molecules.

"This is gold,” she told him, and she used the information in a comic book, crediting Kakalios for the contribution.

So, it’s fitting that "Watchmen” creator Zack Snyder hired Kakalios to help with the "Watchmen” movie. Sure, many things in the "Watchmen” comic defy laws of nature and physics, but the filmmakers wanted Kakalios to help explain "things that were left open.” For instance, why is Dr. Manhattan blue? Kakalios suggested since the character had to rebuild himself atom by atom, maybe it’s Cherenkov radiation, leaking electrons that give nuclear reactor cores their blue glow.

The filmmakers were also excited when Kakalios told them what scientists really scribble on their office blackboards instead of the mishmash of calculus and chemical equations Hollywood normally favors. "That’s just the kind of stuff they liked,” he said.

No surprise. Kakalios speaks their language.