Five awesome ways they bent physics for 'The Avengers'

There's a bit of reality behind Captain America's shield and Thor's lightning

Video: Watch 'Marvel's The Avengers' trailer

By Katharine Gammon Contributor

updated 5/5/2012 4:32:34 PM ET

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The fiction world has long been full of cool science and technology that eventually sneaks its way into real life. Flip phones, for example, were dreamed up on "Star Trek" long before they made it to market. Comic books are no different. "The Avengers," in which Marvel’s greatest superheroes join forces to conquer world-threatening evil, get their turn on the big screen this week.

It turns out that besting a supervillain requires bending a few rules of physics. Here are some of the amazing feats of physics to check out while you’re watching:

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Captain America’s shield
Captain America harnesses the power of "Vibranium," a metal extracted from a meteorite that crashed in Africa. The shield is capable of absorbing, storing and redirecting kinetic energy, and the material becomes more powerful as more weapons are turned against it. In the movie, Captain America redirects a shot from Iron Man’s repulsor ray into a bunch of Chitauri warriors sneaking up on Iron Man.

“The property that lends Vibranium its remarkable characteristics is its ability to store or channel energy in its atomic structure,” said Suveen Mathaudhu, a program manager in the materials science division of the U.S. Army Research Office. He recently contributed to a Journal of Materials story on the science of the Avengers.

Scientists have yet to find a material that gets tougher the more it gets knocked around, but battlefield materials are getting increasingly better at dissipating impact energy.

Thor controls lightning
The Norse god Thor is able to summon lightning by wielding Mjolnir, his trusty enchanted hammer. Thor can channel the storm’s fury into devastating energy blasts that can destroy even secondary Adamantium. In real life, companies are tinkering with artificial lightning. Applied Energetics, a company that develops lasers and particle beam systems, has built a lightning gun that can stall cars or defuse roadside bombs.

Wireless power for aliens
In the movie, shape-shifting Chitauri aliens are wirelessly powered by their mothership. While wireless powering (especially for something so big) remains difficult and inefficient for non-super beings, many researchers, including a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are working to make this a reality. The most common form of wireless power transmission — for example, the consumer devices that can charge cellphones — use direct induction followed by resonant magnetic induction, but other methods under consideration include electromagnetic radiation in the form of microwaves or lasers.

Iron Man’s suit
“One thing we can learn is that many, many science fiction heroes are scientists and engineers who use their innovative scientific discoveries to support or lend them their super-characteristics,” Mathaudhu said. Iron Man (alias Tony Stark) is a prime example. Iron Man’s armored suits give him superhuman strength and durability, flight, repulsors and the unibeam projector. They also have energy shields, an electromagnetic pulse generator, arm-mounted cannons and projectile launchers, various tools like a drill or detachable hip lasers, and can absorb and release energy. In real life, exoskeletons developed for military purposes have been shown to support soldiers as they run at speeds of up to 10 mph while lugging 200 extra pounds of gear.

Interdimensional portals
Even a demigod like Loki needed a scientist (astrophysicist Dr. Erik Selvig) to build a device to open up an inter-dimensional portal. “Scientists often [think in a way] that is predisposed to the limitations of the current physical world. However, science fiction has no such constraints and thus can stimulate creativity and innovation in unique ways. In the fictional world, they are not limited to the technology of today, and are free to image the extreme possibilities of science and materials, which often become realities in the real world in the future,” Mathaudhu said.

In fact, Einsteinian physics do provide hints at how transport through wormholes might be achieved. By current standards, such portals seem wildly unlikely, but no more so than an evil Norse god waging war against a team of superheroes.

More movie science on msnbc.com:

Explainer: The accuracy of 10 disaster flicks

20Th Century Fox

Film director M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" terrified movie audiences with the tale of a mysterious toxin that causes loss of speech, physical disorientation and death. But if anyone is worried that plants will suddenly evolve a defense mechanism that allows them to communicate with each other and target despoilers of the environment, biologists say you can rest easy. "The Happening" is just one example showing how science can be twisted for the sake of a story well told. Click the "Next" arrow above to learn how science fared in nine other disaster movies.

— John Roach, msnbc.com contributor
1974: 'Earthquake' shakes audiences

Universal Pictures

Movie fans who flocked to see Los Angeles destroyed in 1974's "Earthquake" got to feel the temblor themselves. Theaters were equipped with giant speakers that pumped out sound waves designed to give viewers a sensation of being in the disaster. According to critics, the special effect was a moderate success. And the quake scenes earned some respect from geologists as well. The film's faults include the notion that earthquakes can be predicted 24 hours in advance — they can't. And when earthquakes strike, they shake violently for a few minutes at most, not nine minutes as depicted on the big screen.
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1995: 'Outbreak' virus-stopper unlikely

Warner Bros.

In "Outbreak," an escaped African monkey unleashes a deadly, Ebola-style virus in a northern California town, and scientists race to contain the rapid spread. The plot thickens when a covert plan is uncovered to firebomb the town to keep the wraps on a secretly developed serum to fight an earlier version of the virus in Africa. This serum works on the monkey, but not people who are infected with the new mutant strain. The scientists in the movie hit on the idea that if they captured the monkey, they could obtain the new antibodies and save the world. In real life, experts say, transferring the monkey's antibodies to humans is unlikely to work.
1996: 'Twister' adds new spin to tornado science

Warner Bros.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory proudly notes that "Twister" is based on their 1980s attempt to put a 55-gallon drum-sized instrument full of meteorological sensors — called TOTO — in the path of an oncoming tornado. In the movie, two competing teams of storm chasers race around to put their own storm-measuring contraptions in the path of deadly twisters. One is called Dorothy. In contrast with the movie's depiction, TOTO's instruments were not designed to fly up into a twister, and the contraption achieved only minimal success.
1997: 'Dante's Peak' erupts with accuracy -- and faults

Pacific Western

Volcanologists consider "Dante's Peak" one of the most accurate scientific disaster movies to hit the big screen, despite a few glaring errors. The tale is inspired by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state and is driven by a debate between a town's safety and economic livelihood. The movie earned kudos for its accurate portrayal of the composite volcano eruption, but was also criticized for including fast-flowing lava. Composite volcanoes have thick, slow-moving lava that rebuilds volcano domes after major eruptions. Other faults in the film include overly acidic lake waters and an excessively large earthquake linked to the eruption.
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1998: 'Deep Impact' more realistic than 'Armageddon'

In the year that Hollywood hurled a comet and asteroid at planet Earth, only the rocky snowball had a credible scientific spin. The comet movie, "Deep Impact," was particularly lauded for the depiction of the comet's energy and consequences of a direct hit. Astronomers took issue with characters who observed the night sky with their lights on and determined the comet's doomsday orbit from a single data point. "Armageddon," the asteroid movie, fared better at the box office but is considered far less scientifically accurate.
2002: '28 Days Later' haunts psyche, not scientists

In the haunting "28 Days Later," a bicycle courier wakes from a coma, alone, in a hospital bed in a nearly deserted London. Uncaged chimpanzees have liberated the "rage virus" that passes from person to person with a single drop of bodily fluid and rapidly transforms the infected into indiscriminate killers. While it's a frightening prospect, scientists say no virus can spread and produce such symptoms so quickly, and no virus causes disease in everyone it infects. Nevertheless, the film was a huge success and spawned a 2007 sequel, "28 Weeks Later."
2003: 'The Core' attracts interest in Earth's magnetic field

Paramount Pictures

In "The Core," Earth's magnetic field rapidly deteriorates, and chaos ensues: Birds crash into buildings, the Golden Gate Bridge collapses, and lightning bolts zap city streets. All could get much worse unless "terranauts" journey to the depths of the planet and jump-start the core with a nuclear bomb. The premise of the movie is grounded in fact: Earth's magnetic field does fluctuate and even reverses every 100,000 years or so. But no human can withstand the crushing pressures 1,700 miles beneath the surface, and scientists say the movie exaggerates the importance of the magnetic field to daily life. Nevertheless, the flick did jack up interest in a controversial theory, published at the time of the movie's release, that says the core is powered by a natural nuclear reactor that could give out in as little as 100 years.
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2004: 'Day After Tomorrow' hypes climate science

20th Century Fox via AP

Hollywood's doomsday movie "The Day After Tomorrow" used a kernel of climate science to hype awareness about global warming two years before former Vice President Al Gore sobered audiences with "An Inconvenient Truth." Yes, Hollywood's tale is way over the top — but the ocean current that is halted in the movie to trigger the sudden freeze is slowing due to the rapid melt of Arctic ice, studies suggest. The current probably won't completely shut down, and it won't send a tsunami into the streets of New York. However, scientists do say that subtler and slower changes such as melting ice sheets, rising sea levels and stronger storms could wreak similarly catastrophic damage in the long run.
2004: '10.5' causes scientists to guffaw

Nbc

Not all scientific disasters happen on the big screen, as illustrated by the implausibly devastating earthquake in the TV miniseries "10.5." The magnitude-10.5 earthquake that splits California in two is pure fiction, experts say, because the faults that underlie the state are too small. Lucy Jones, an earthquake expert at the U.S. Geological Survey, told The Associated Press that "the production is blatantly inconsistent with everything we know about earthquakes." No need to worry, for example, about the earth opening up in an earthquake as shown in this scene from the miniseries.