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 was astoundingly correct or hilariously wrong it functioned as the gateway drug to careers in STEM for the generation that grew up and created personal computers and mapped the human genome. We’ll keep the math to the minimum as we look at how chemistry and physics were depicted, the people behind it, and the comic book influences on Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most popular science writers of his day.
