Between fiction and reality
The science behind superman!
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…Well, you know how it ends, don’t you? It’s a sentence so iconic, there are probably kids shouting it in Swahili as you read this.
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Behind all the fiction and the magic of superman there is some science to be found behind him even in his beginnings Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster created superman as an ordinary human who consumes pills and steroids to acquire superhuman strength and although steroids are common today in 1933 steroids were unknown to many and it was still developing.
X-Ray Vision!
Let's start with the physics of x-rays. These rays pass through any atoms without enough mass to stop them. When atoms absorb a photon, one of their electrons has to jump up from a space near the atom to a space farther away from the atom using a precise the amount of energy. The problem is, electrons can't just jump into any space – they can only occupy certain energy levels. If the atom that a photon hits doesn't have the energy levels to absorb the photon, the photon passes right through it. Lightweight atoms just don't have the energy levels to absorb high energy x-rays. In the human body, only calcium manages to really absorb x-rays. Since there's no calcium in the photoreceptors in our eyes, we can't see x-rays. If Superman can see them, then his eyeballs, when exposed to enough yellow sunlight, must incorporate