This is how you could defeat Wolverine with science.
There are many practically indestructible characters
in pop culture, from the Incredible Hulk
to Deadpool to Superman
and to, of course, Wolverine.
And Wolverine in particular is an interesting case
because half the reason he is so hard to destroy
is straight up science.
The adamantium grafted onto his bones,
which means if you had to,
science would also be the best way to defeat him.
(energetic music)
Found you.
Let's set up a hypothetical scenario.
Say we are some kind of, ooh, super villain
and we want to defeat Wolverine.
I don't know, maybe we fundamentally disagree
with how veiny he is in all the movies.
If we tracked or lured Wolverine to some location,
I see four main advantages
of his that we would have to contend with.
First of all, he's very fast, he's very strong,
he's very durable (metallic impacts)
and he's very sharp.
Cool, thanks.
Given everything that makes Wolverine so dangerous,
if we wanted to defeat him
then keeping him at a distance would be our best bet as
would attacking him in ways that don't immediately fail
to his healing factor.
So now, it's time to set a trap.
(evil laugh)
Super villain chuckling.
(cackles)
Still backing up.
We can start simple.
Oxygen is one of the most critical components
in the trillions and trillions
of continuous chemical reactions
that you call whatever your name is.
Unlike food, unlike water, the amount of time
that you can survive without O2 is obviously measured
in seconds and not weeks or days.
You need oxygen to live,
but you also need oxygen to heal.
According to a recent study in the journal Wounds,
oxygen must be tightly governed
in all phases of wound healing
to produce viable tissue.
Nearly every step in the wound healing process
requires oxygen.
In other words, without O2,
Logan wouldn't be able to live
nor would he able to regenerate.
And so to defeat Wolverine, one tactic would be to
(knife slicing) cut off the oxygen.
Our first mutant fighting move (manic laughing)
is to construct a giant vacuum chamber.
I call it Void Boy.
I'll fit it with half a dozen turbo pumps,
all we would have to do is find some way
to lure Wolverine inside Void Boy here.
I don't know, maybe we tell him
that there's a sick motorcycle in there.
Yeah, he'd never be able to resist that.
Once he's inside, we seal him in.
And if we constructed this chamber correctly
with the right dimensions
and the right pumping requirements,
within a few seconds, he would pass out
due to lack of oxygen.
Within a few minutes, he would die
and within a few hours, he would be
under space-like conditions
with no oxygen to breathe or regenerate with.
A chamber like this wouldn't be impossible
to construct either.
NASA has one at their Space Power Facility.
It's giant, it's cold, it has thick concrete walls
that Wolverine wouldn't be able to
get through and it can simulate a space-like environment
to test NASA's equipment in, in just a few short hours
of turbo pumping.
Let's just check on Wolverine real quick.
(manic laughing)
(clears throat)
Or we can deprive Wolverine of oxygen
and therefore the ability to regenerate
with another fluid, water.
If we lured him into a similarly constructed chamber
with the promise of, I don't know, Canada's finest poutine,
then once he was inside, we could turbo pump
in water until there was no air left
for Logan and he would sink to the bottom
of the chamber because he's denser than the average person
because of all the adamantium.
Even if, in both of these chambers,
Wolverine doesn't asphyxiate or drown and die
in the same way that we would die,
eventually all his cells in these situations
would run out of oxygen
and he would have to truly die,
barring some kind of comic book miracle.
Oh, look, alternate universe.
He's fine again.
We can go on the offensive too, because even though
we can't make it through Wolverine's adamantium,
we can still affect what's inside.
Even in theory, there is no theoretical sports helmet
that could prevent 100% of concussions.
Physics makes that impossible.
Your brain is not pressed right up against your skull,
it is floating in sweet, sweet thought juice.
And so if you impact your skull with something,
your skull will move, as will the helmet
that you're wearing, but when everything comes
to a stop, because it has some distance to travel
through that sick thought fluid,
your brain can keep going, thanks to inertia
and impact the side of your skull,
and when that happens, you can get bleeding, bruising,
and shearing of the brain.
A concussion.
The inevitability of your brain's inertia was summed up
this way by a study published in 2012,
in the journal, Clinics in Sports Medicine.
They say, quote, "At this point,
"there is little evidence supporting the use
"of specific helmets or mouth guards
"to prevent concussion."
In other words, no matter what Wolverine's skull
is made out of, adamantium or not, we can still concuss him.
Good, gah, ow!
Our second anti-Wolverine tactic will be to concuss
him from afar.
And by far, the easiest way to do that
would be to get some kind of projectile
with enough impact force behind it
that it will accelerate Wolverine's head, skull,
and brain like a linebacker would.
Good, he doesn't smell us yet, he's staying over there.
(sniffs) Oh, fresh.
To give Wolverine the benefit of the doubt here,
let's be very conservative and start
with just a basic 9mm bullet fired from a handgun.
Let's say that it's traveling a little
over the speed of sound when it impacts
Wolverine's indestructible skull in a little
over a millisecond and it has eight grams of mass.
Do the math and we get a little over 2700 newtons
of force.
Using this force value we can now apply it
to Wolverine's head to see how much
this force can accelerate it.
Assuming that all this force goes perfectly
into accelerating Wolverine's head,
I assume that his head had a little bit more mass
than the average person's head,
then you find that this bullet, this simple bullet,
could accelerate it at up to 63 G's.
60 G's is well within concussion range for a human,
no, he must smell us!
But I was so fresh!
Wolverine has human-like physiology,
which means that if our math is correct,
we could incapacitate him, fire,
with relatively modest hardware
and then dispose of him as we wish later.
And it turns out that our math is correct.
In 2015, the Institute of Security Technologies
published a study that, oh, sorry, this is
the wrong study, we've gone through a lot
of studies.
In 2015, the Institute of Security Technologies
published a study reporting on experiments
that were done on cadaver skulls.
They were firing 9mm bullets at these skulls
wearing military-grade helmets,
and they found, in the majority of cases,
brain injury, like concussion.
That's because, like Wolverine's adamantium skull,
the helmets were absorbing the impact,
but still dangerously accelerating the head.
And other studies have found similar results.
The fact that concussing Wolverine with a handgun
or any larger firearm is a viable tactic
according to math, makes this scene in X2,
technically the most accurate scene
in any X-Men film.
Of course, behind this one.
What is even happening there?
Is he spinning around and then coming back?
Is he cutting through it as he's going, is he?
Our sciencey strategy could be so much more
than Homo sapiens and their guns though,
because Wolverine's worst enemy
might be electromagnetism.
If you're familiar at all with Wolverine,
you know that his metal endoskeleton
is extremely susceptible to magnetic fields.
In one of the most famous X-Men panels of all time,
Magneto uses this fact to rip all the adamantium
out of his body at once, yeesh.
And if his endoskeleton responds to magnetism
in this way, it means that it's probably
a good conductor, which means that we can affect it
with electromagnetism in a much more sinister
and sciency way (ominous chuckling).
Oh, wow!
When you run an electric current through a material
like a metal that is a conductor,
if it's not a superconductor,
it will start to build up resistance inside
of it in the form of heat.
If that heat gets high enough and you have
the right material, you can start to emit light.
That's how incandescent lightbulbs work.
Or you can use this resistance property
to just put so much current through a material
that you liquefy it.
Now I know what you are probably already thinking.
If we wanna defeat Wolverine in this way,
why not just hook him up to a source
of extreme voltage and burn him to death
from the inside out?
Well, that's a good idea, nerd.
It's so good an idea that that's what
the Punisher did to kill Wolverine already,
but remember, we are just mere mortals
and we don't wanna get anywhere near
Wolverine and his claws like the Punisher did.
Don't worry though, there is another way.
Back, back, back, back, I say!
That option is called induction heating,
and oh, ooh, it's so evil (cackling).
Electricity and magnetism are linked.
Electromagnetism.
And one very cool, and almost magical property
of this linkage is called induction.
So for example, if I took a magnet
and its magnetic field and I moved it
through this coil of wire, it would induce,
or create, an electrical current inside of that wire.
And this works the other way, too.
If we run a changing electrical current
through this wire, it will create a changing magnetic field
through this loop.
Now if we take some conductor and put it
in this changing magnetic field,
it will induce an electrical current inside
of the conductor, which will induce heat,
induction heating, and it will get really, really hot
and I think you can see where we're going with this.
We construct a giant cylinder
and wrap miles and miles of extra-conductive wire
around it, where heroes go to die.
I call it the Dangerously Conductive Electrical Unit
or DCEU.
Then we lure Wolverine inside.
I don't know, we tell him there's half a cigar in there.
Yeah, yeah, that will do the trick,
he could never resist that.
Then, once he's inside, we flick the switch,
sending a dangerous amount of electrical current
through these wires, which creates a giant changing
magnetic field inside of it,
which starts to induce an electrical current
inside of Wolverine's adamantium,
which creates heat, so much heat, in fact,
through this induction heating process
that everything aside from his adamantium
starts to boil off of his body until there is nothing left
but metal scaffolding, whew.
Magneto.
Wolverine has been defeated many, many times
in various media, almost always at the hands
of some super being.
We may not be super, but with a little knowledge
of his powers, how they work, how to circumvent them,
and take advantage of them with science,
we could best the beast too.
With vacuum, acceleration, and electromagnetism.
Because, science (ominous laughter).
Am I a bad guy now?
(electronic music)
This video could easily have been an hour long,
because Wolverine has died in the comics
canonically over a dozen times.
So there are many different ways to tackle this situation.
I went with the most sciency, coolest sounding, to me,
ways, like induction heating.
One of the coolest in the comics though,
that I've seen, is in The Death of Wolverine.
And spoilers if you haven't read it,
but at the very end, Wolverine dies
because he is encased in an adamantium sarcophagus.
He pieces a tub of adamantium,
which covers him and then solidifies
and he is stuck in it as a statue of himself
in adamantium and he suffocates in there.
Which is a beautiful comic panel
and it also proves our point about oxygen.
Think about that.
Ow.
Thank you so much for watching, James.
If you want more of me, please follow us
on social media at these handles
and the big thing I wanna remind you
of is The Science of Mortal Kombat.
It's out, the very first episode
and the first behind the scenes episode
are now on Because Science's YouTube channel.
We put some Sub-Zero fatalities to the test.
You're gonna wanna check it out.
(energetic music)