The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood

In 2008, the release of the Iron Man and The Dark Knight films would light the match that ignited the superhero explosion at the multiplex. As popular culture has been inundated with superhero characters, along the way the movie and TV watching public have been introduced to cutting-edge physics concepts. Topics ranging from the Multiverse to Artificial Intelligence, from Active Matter to the Planck Length (also known as the Quantum Realm), from Nanotechnology to Granular Matter have shown up in superhero films and TV shows, and moreover often they get their science right. This is due in part to the efforts of card-carrying physicists working with the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange program. In this talk I’ll describe examples of real physics underlying the cinematic superheroes’ adventures. This talk will confirm what we all have long suspected—they couldn’t put it in a movie if it weren’t true!