I have decided to tread totally new ground.

NO SERIOUSLY NO ONE HAS EVER DONE THIS GUYS.
GUYS SERIOUSLY.

I’m asking for you guys to submit questions about some feat of strength by your favorite superhero in a comic, movie, or tv show and then I will study the  physics.  This series is to be entitled, hold on to your hats, ‘Superhero Science!’

Groundbreaking stuff, I know.  Enough (Bruce)Banter.  Today I take on the man of steel himself.

Courtesy Dustin Dorough and Adam Jay

More specifically, the Superman in JLA Vol. 1 Issue #77(March 2003).
Do yourself a favor and go pick it up at your local comic shop.

Imagine a black hole ‘no bigger than a speck of dust’ that is contained and stabilized within a magnetic field.  I don’t want to spoil the joy of reading the comic for yourself by explaining it all here, but suffice it to say, Justice League members lose their memories and other general mischief occurs.

The feat of strength that is subject to study today comes at the end.  The magnetic field stabilizer gets destroyed and the black hole becomes a danger TO THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, OH NO!  To stop this little ball of science from destroying everything Superman wraps his fists around it to contain it and then flies it off into a wormhole deep in space.

Here’s the quick and dirty on the Science of black holes:

Everything has an attractive force called gravity.  That’s everything folks.  From the Earth to the Sun and from Mount Everest right down to your favorite pair of parachute pants.

So, I’m attractive.  There’s proof.

So, how do we measure gravity?  We use a universal constant divined by the man himself, Albert Einstein.  We multiply this constant times the mass of the two objects involved and divide by the distance between them.

So, what does this have to do with a black hole?  Well, because this force is constant, and acts on literally every of bit of matter in the universe.  You must apply a force greater than that in the opposite direction to get away.  The more mass something has, the greater the force of gravity and the greater the force required to move away from it.

Disclaimer: Due to the principle of superposition the ‘magnetic stabilizer’ would have no effect on the gravitational force of the black hole.  We have to assume that at some point in the DC universe a scientist solved quantum gravity and was able to build a device that could contain a gravity field and that this function was also inherent in Superman’s skin.

First, we have to try and calculate the mass of our little black wonder using Einstein’s constant, the speed of light, and the Schwarzschild radius, which is the distance from the center of the black hole to the event horizon.

It was difficult to track down a standardized size for dust particles but according to Microsoft Encarta 2003 and HEPA filtration specifications the standardized result is about .5 µm or .0000005 meters.

The answer to this problem should give you a good idea of just how massive black holes are.  The estimated amount of mass in a black hole the size of a speck of dust is:

That’s 25,000 times the mass of Mt. Everest.
Or as we say in the scientific world ‘a crap load’.

Now that we have the mass, we have to figure out how close the insides of Superman’s hands are to the black hole.  There was a study done that found a correlation between the height of a person and the sizeof their hands.  The found that a person’s height is roughly 9 times the length of their hand.  Superman’s height has been listed between 6’ and 6’3” so crunching the numbers gave me a distance of about 1 cm.

Using our equation of force yields a number that once again should reinforce why black holes are so incredible.  On just one of Superman’s hands the force is about

That’s HUGE.

As a reference, we know Superman’s skin repels bullets with ease.  I did a quick calculation using average bullet masses and velocities  to find that the amount of force a bullet at 10 ft. exerts is about 576 Newtons. This obviously varies greatly from weapon to weapon but for my purposes, it works.

The force of gravity that Superman is fighting against is 19,460,000 more powerful than a bullet fired at close range.

I’ve seen Superman shot many times in my life but I can’t recall any time in which 20 million bullets hit him at once in exactly the same spot.

Even if his skin could somehow stop or at the very least greatly reduce the force of gravity outside his hands and even if he could somehow move the object without letting his skin pass the event horizon, it would still be difficult to justify that his superhuman strength goes this far.

One more cool thing about black holes:

Albert Einstein predicted a phenomena in his Theory of Relativity that gravity affects the relative movement of time.  The more powerful the gravitational force, the slower the movement of time.  ‘Slower’ is not a great way to describe it but trust me when I tell you that the math for time dilation can get sticky.  So, not only are the physical forces tearing you to pieces as you approach the black hole, time becomes stretched out and eventually stops altogether.

And of course none of this matters because Green Lantern is involved and we have no way to accurately measure Willpower.

A Willpowermanometer?

Narf out.