Comments

I completely agree that the purpose of this article is to find a healthy way to apply our interest in physics to such an awesome movie, but when i see calculational errors it certainly makes me cringe... When calculating the force on Batman's arms while opening his wings, the gravitational force and the centripetal force are acting in perpendicular directions (down and horizontally) and cannot just be added together. (It happens to not make much difference in this cases since one is so much larger than the other, but still.) And I'll agree that for Batman to have that much cable handy, saying the cross sectional area is 1 cm is reasonable. However, 63 billion N/m^2 DOES NOT convert to 63,000 N/cm^2!!! It converts to 6.3 million, which is strong enough to support the assumptions made. It seems a far more reasonable argument to assume that the lightposts would have broken off (assuming that Gotham uses a common, low strength material for its thousands of lightposts).