Yahoo! A very plausible explanation for the powers. Wow, Bob, this is great!
Clark, to put it bluntly, you grabbed it in the wrong place.”
Clark looks pained now. “Bernie, please get to the point.”
“Clark, the space transport was intended to be lifted in only one way. The mechanical structure was designed to be able to support its mass only if it were lifted at certain strong points. It had to be designed that way to keep the weight as low as possible. You just grabbed it on a convenient surface. It should have collapsed from the mechanical stress as soon as you attempted to lift it.”
This is so true. In real life, it's much harder to make things stand up to physical forces. I am no engineer, but even in casual reading/viewing I've come across some examples of Nature's laws.
One of the finest examples was that film clip of the
Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge starting to sway or vibrate in a harmonic motion - and it shook itself apart.
Why do things fall down? Or a better question, is why shouldn't they? The engineers have to design and build them to stand up to trouble, like mechanical stress. "When in doubt, build it stout."
“How about this? Think of a photon and an electron. One is a packet of light energy. The other is a piece of matter. The photon is has a mass of zero and the electron has mass. But at the quantum level, they are both fundamentally packets of energy. The difference... The *big* difference between them, is that the electron has a Higgs interaction and the photon doesn’t. Everything we call matter is only like that because of a Higgs interaction at the subatomic level. A stronger Higgs interaction results in the particle having a greater mass. If there was some way to reduce the Higgs interaction of matter, you would effectively reduce the mass.”
Wow! This is quite understandable to the non-physics newbie. Well done.
Now Clark looks embarrassed. “Bernie, I was Journalism major. I didn’t take much physics.”
I love that line. I think it's because that if Clark took physics, he'd know that what he was doing was impossible. And then he might not be able to do it anymore. (*snicker*)
But now, with your grand new theory, it makes perfect sense! I can see Bernie getting the Nobel Prize for this. It'll take some years, as he said, to investigate it fully, but it will be as profoundly altering to our worldview as the introduction of Einsteinian physics was.
Even if this information stirred up a new interest in Higgs research, I don't see that much will be accomplished within the next fifty years.”
Oh, I don't know. If everyone knows that it's the secret to Superman's powers, that'll kick-start things right now.
Once again, Bob, I'm loving the hard science background info. Yeah, it's expositionary, but you're doing a great job with that too. You mentioned in a previous post that you were leaving out the science bits - don't!
(Or maybe you could put them in a separate appendix for the interested.)
Thank you so much for the kind words. I know what you mean about that scene in Superman: The Movie when he catches Lois falling. Higgs neutralization solves that problem. If her mass/inertia was reduced (substantially) by biofield-induced Higgs dampening, the force of him catching her could be the about the same as if he had caught her after only a short drop. In that situation, the forces on Lois would be the same as it looked in the movie. 