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Green Lantern and Crystal Meth
In Green Lantern Season Two #10 (Feb 2021) Hal Jordan drops the formula C10H15N and immediately identifies it as crystal meth. There are numerous structures of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen that fit that formula, only one of them being methamphetamine.
Search for Earliest Chemical Formula in Comic Books
I will forever laud Metamorpho simply for the inclusion of the actual formula HNO3 in Metamorpho #3 (Nov Dec 1965). This is the earliest actual chemical formula that I’ve been able to identify in comics If anyone has an earlier example please let me know!
HeroesCon Charlotte
Giving a panel at Heroes Convention in Charlotte, NC, June 25, 2022. STEM in Silver Age Comics: They Blinded Me with Science! STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) in the Silver Age wasn’t just lab accidents and adamantium – sometimes it was an actual gravitational free fall problem or a sulphur-selenium exchange reaction. Whether the science […]
The Hulk in Free Fall
In contrast to Simon Stagg counting up to the well-known and often published escape velocity, here we have a genuine motion situation that would be familiar to any beginning student. One slight issue: the answer is wrong (both from the math as solved and from the reality of the situation we’re facing). That does not […]
Can Hoover Dam Flood Las Vegas?
In Godzilla #9 (Apr 1978) Doug Moench wrote a plot where Hoover Dam threatened to break, flooding Las Vegas. Radioactive breath kaiju rampaging through Nevada? Sure! Who cannot get behind that? Hoover Dam flooding Las Vegas? Nope – no way. First off, Las Vegas is not downstream of Hoover Dam. Second, Las Vegas is about […]
Where from here?
Gentle readers, The Lemony Snicket Allusions you’ve all been reading are still here — but I’m now working on a project on STEM in Silver Age comic books and…. having a site already… feel this is a good place to publish some of my work in progress and get feedback. For more of a sense […]
Firestorm and Ergs
DC managed to have an interesting a physics problem in the debut of Firestorm in his/their origin story Firestorm the Nuclear Man #1 (Mar 1978): “A million ergs of radiation pour through…” Ronnie Raymond and Martin Stein. We’ve seen similar amounts of energy before when we talked about Hulk falling. An erg is a g-cm2sec-2 which […]