Supervillain Science: The Human Torch
Posted by Science Oxford on October 2, 2009 | comments
Welcome back, aspiring supervillains to part 2 of an introductory course in Eeevil!
In this Supervillain Science series you will learn how to apply science and scientific thinking to the thorny problem of how to take over the world.
As we all know, the actual taking over of the world is simple, it’s always just one thing that gets in our way – Superheroes. So we’ll be concentrating on how to defeat a couple of the more well known examples of this pathetic class of individuals, and hopefully you’ll go away with a few ideas of how to beat your own super-nemeses.
THE HUMAN TOURCH
This Genetically-modified mook goes by the name of The Human Torch. In the same storm of gamma radiation which gave the Fantastic Four their super powers, Johnny storm was granted the ability to make himself ‘Flame On’, fly and control the fire which springs from his body.
A useful thing indeed. The question is – how the heck does making yourself go on fire help make you fly?
Fear not – we have a theory…
Let’s see if you can work it out, to prove your worth as evil genius’.
If you take an egg – normal, raw egg and drop it into this glass of water it would sink.
Right. Now, remove the egg, put some zipzorp desinkifier(salt) into the glass of water, give it a whirl and now, we grab our egg again, drop it in aaaand…it floats!
SO how did that work? Right, this water is really salty, so it’s denser, and less dense things float on more sense things. Hot air works the same, this is broadly because hot air is less dense than cold air, and less dense things always float on more dense things.
So being fire retardant, the Human Torch must be able to change his relative density at will.
Now, luckily, we can use this fact to trap him. Watch the video below what we have here is a caged spinning board, with a flame in it. Watch what happens when it is spun.
As you can see, the flame is carried into the centre of spinning vortex. This is because the cage basically gives the air a smack as it goes around, giving a sideways movement, which causes the shape you see.
So all we need to do is put the invisible woman (who we captured in our previous session) in the centre, wait for him to fly in and watch as he’s helpless to escape.
What do you think?