oh yeah super strength may in fact be the first superpower that humans ever thought up impossibly strong men and women have been in our stories for literally thousands of years from Hercules to the Incredible Hulk it seems that it's human to fantasize about breaking unbreakable things but if we consider the reality of having immense strength I don't think that this is a superpower you'd actually want we'll just continue let's go super powers are awesome thought experiments we get to imagine and create stories around what would happen to us and the world if our mortal variables change but we tend to only focus on one side of the equation for super-strength that's the fantasy of the overpowered punching and lifting and smashing that we could do the other side of the equation however is the reality of being this strong a reality that comes with weird and gross consequences oh yeah first what is strength well if we are talking about muscles oh yes then we are talking about the force that muscles can generate excavation of a football in an easy way to measure the forces that muscles generate is with something called a strain gauge and it looks something like this very basically it is a coil of conductive wire attached to some sticky substrate or less technically under stuff now if this changes its length when I hit it then it will change the length of the coil of wire which will change how easily electricity flows through it so if you rig this up with some known force say you hung a five kilogram weight from it then you would know if you push pulled or hated exactly what the change in voltage meant in terms of force for context 2500 Newtons would be a very good punch so what then is super strength well it has to be applying larger forces that humans can usually generate to affect objects in ways that humans usually can't think about punching through a concrete wall classic super strength move estimating the surface area that the average human fist and the compressive strength of concrete will get more into that math in a minute punching through a wall like this wouldn't take 2,500 Newton's of force no it would take 250,000 a hundred times more to do this you'd have to be a hundred times stronger than the average person which sounds about right oh yeah but what would life be like if you were a hundred times stronger or more well it wouldn't be all fun and games like ping pong is oh oh Darwyn human society is engineered for the average everything door sizes are engineered for the average height person and stop signs have lettering on them that can be seen by a person with average eyesight now imagine how hard it would be to interact with society if you were a hundred times stronger than the average person or more handles would come flying off heavy doors when you try to open them you know the kinds of heavy doors that have at restaurants and make you look weak in public accidentally bending your glasses would be a constant struggle and even if you could expertly control the application of your super strength dexterity would be an issue imagine how difficult it would be to be a hundred times more gentle in your daily life any action that wasn't punching through a bank vault would be so much harder that doesn't make any sense but you get the idea okay fine but what about doing other classic superhero stuff like punching a hero so hard that he um sure but it's not gonna be nearly as cool for you consider this very punchable Apple no matter where I hid it or how hard I hit it the Apple always presses back on me with an equal amount of force just in the opposite direction that's what smart boy Isaac Newton laid out in his third law of motion no force can exist in the universe without an equal and opposite force to accompany it oh you probably think I'm gonna smash through that and say oh yeah no that would be silly Newton's third law of motion means that every super-powered punch or kick I throw is going to apply just as much force to me as to my target just in the opposite direction so if I applied the probably millions of newtons of upward force I'd need to launch Superman into the Sun like Team Rocket it wouldn't just leave me standing here looking all cool no it would bury me into the dirt and if I try to punch him across a room like superheroes do to each other all the time if it's enough force to accelerate his mass all the way back that way then it is enough to do the exact same thing to me so living a normal life with super-strength would likely be a hassle as would fighting other super beings fine what about playing the hero it's out for revenge super strength stories are usually only concerned with force but it is pressure that will keep that super force from being very useful oh no a car has row on top of my precious hat conditioner I know I will use my super-strength and lift it off with just one why did that happen well even though I can generate super forces they're applied over just the surface area of my hand which isn't very much if pressure equals force divided by area then lifting a car that weighs many thousands of Newtons with just my hand we'll be applying mega Pascal's hundreds or even thousands of pounds per square inch to the structural elements of the car dang it we make cars out of very strong materials these days so if you picked it up like Superman on the cover of Action Comics number one then the car might just Bend in a way you're not expecting but if you caught it like Spider Man you would crush it and if you lifted it like Christopher Reeve is in this photo you would spear it super flick nope yep what did I expect and the pressure problem only gets worse as what you are trying to stop or lift or save it gets heavier consider this scene in Superman Returns where he saves an entire Plane full of people by stopping the plane on its nose I'm gonna be generous here and say that the plane has lost some mass at this point and it has slowed down from cruising speed and it stops in around 5 seconds over the surface area of Superman's hands if that is the case then Superman is applying 700 million Pascal's of pressure to the nose of this plane a bird impact does the same thing and military studies have found that when unfortunately a bird hits a plane mid-flight it doesn't even produce a fourth of this pressure which means that Superman is more likely to go through a plane than to save it by stopping it in this way oh don't worry I'll save you [Music] I'm sorry sir man super pressures make the big displays of super strength much harder to pull off if not impossible fine so what about the most super strength thing of all punch in bad guys well that's not impossible it's just gonna be gross think back to punching through a concrete wall exerting that kind of force hundreds of thousands of Newtons on the average-sized person is enough to accelerate that person's body up to hundreds of G's of acceleration more than enough to throw them across the room like we see in movies and comic books and TV shows video games so just punch them like that right well if our benchmark for super strength is being able to apply this much force over just this amount of surface area a few dozen square centimeters for your fist this equals the compressive strength of concrete which is much much higher than the compressive or tensile strength of human so if you were to apply this kind of super strength to a bad guy you're either going to punch through them or you are gonna punch something off of them oh oh I'm so sorry let me fix you dark son of a biscuit so even though we have fantasized about having super strength for literally thousands of years I don't think you'd actually want it at least not current pop culture's iteration of it manipulating and interacting with everyday objects would be a total pain lifting cars and throwing buildings would be nearly impossible and fighting bad guys would be less throwing them across the room and more murder besides super strength isn't even a possibility without other superpowers durability and density without those the first thing to break during a Hulk like smash didn't be a bad guy it would be you because sent you because science Jimmy a wall anyway I'm going through it oh yeah [Music] sure you could argue that if you had super-strength you would be able to apply it delicately so you weren't punching through people and cars and stuff but then you wouldn't really be performing the kinds of actions that we see superheroes do if you wanted to punch someone across a room or lift a car or lift a building it's not gonna turn out like you think I mean you could if you want to throw someone across the room what you'd have to do is just very very slowly shove them don't worry I'll save you aah I didn't kill him I could have though thank you so much for watching Diana if you want more of me on something else you can check out Squatch with me and Dan Casey or you can check out the space program on project alpha comm where if you sign up now for a free 30-day trial you can get this show and other Nerdist and geek and sundry content earlier than anyone else sounds good right well cool and fall because science over here and meet [Music]