The Science of Superman

What is it that makes Superman Super? And is there any basis in 'real' science for the man of steel?

When we examine Superman, we need to remember that, in a sense, we’re examining all the superheroes who follow. Superheroes have always been created with broad brushstrokes. Not a lot of time was spent on deducing the limits or nonlimits of our super characters. Even less attention was paid to their interaction with ordinary people and objects. ‘When Superman lifts a car over his head to shake criminals to the ground, no one ever questions why the car doesn’t fall to pieces. Nobody questions how Superman stays perfectly balanced on Earth while waving over his head an item that has a mass twenty times greater than his own.

How often have we seen Superman fly down and pull a car up by the roof into the sky? In the real world, there are few vehicles that would even hold together if Superman yanked them up by the roof. The car would probably continue forward, with the roof ripped off and held by Superman. Every time Superman lifts a building into the air, why don’t all the bricks, held together by cement and pressure, suddenly start falling apart? Those are the types of ordinary problems that seem never to occur in any superhero adventures. Basically, superheroes perform super acts and the logic squad cleans up afterwards.

In Superman’s first appearance in the 1938 Action Comics, we’re informed “that he could leap one-eighth of a mile; hurdle a twenty-Story building . . . raise tremendous weights . . . run faster than an express train . . . and that nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin!”

Siegel and Shuster’s explanation of Superman’s powers, as given in Action Comics #1, left much to the imagination. Their main premise was that Superman came from a civilization much more advanced than ours and thus the inhabitants were physically more advanced than humans. By extrapolation, this argument implies that modem man is physically much stronger than Cro-Magnon man or Neanderthal man. Of course, our ancestors lived only a few hundred centuries before us, while Superman’s race was described as being millions of years ahead of ours. A full-page illustration in Superman #1 (Summer 1939) gave a “scientific explanation of Superman’s amazing strength.”

“Superman came to Earth from the planet Krypton, whose inhabitants had evolved, after millions of years, to physical perfection. The smaller size of our planet, with its slighter gravity pull, assists Super-man s tremendous muscles in the performances of miraculous feats of strength.”