- Magneto, I'm disappointed in you, man.
You're one of the most powerful mutants to ever live,
and yet, you could be so much more powerful if you
simply looked into the science of your own superpowers.
You can do more than levitate and pull iron
out of abusive security guards' blood.
Here are seven superpowers that you may not have thought of.
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Magneto was created all the way back in 1963
by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as Max Eisenhardt,
a human mutant with the ability
to generate and manipulate magnetic fields.
Now, unless you avidly read X-Men comics, most of what
you've seen Magneto do is move metals around and levitate.
But if Magneto can manipulate magnetic fields, he has
way more superpowers than just those.
But first, magnetism, how does that work?
Magnetism is a part of electromagnetism, one of the four
fundamental forces of the universe.
This force binds electricity and magnetism together
such that changing an electric field creates
a magnetic field as described by Ampère's law.
And changing a magnetic field induces an electric field
as described by Faraday's law of induction.
Now what about magnets, how do they work?
Down at the quantum scale, the motion
of tiny charged particles like electrons
creates tiny magnetic fields.
The two are linked remember, so just about all matter
that you know of is intrinsically magnetic,
just of varying intensities.
So for example, this marker is what we call diamagnetic.
In the presence of a magnetic field, its tiny particles
create a magnetic field that opposes
the magnetic field it's inside.
We consider these kind of materials to be non-magnetic.
On the other hand, if you take a ferromagnetic material,
like this piece of iron, in the presence of a magnetic field
all of its tiny magnets align to create
the kind of magnet that you're used to.
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What Magneto can do in the comic books and movies
and TV shows is then based on the link between electricity
and magnetism and the interaction
of these forces and fields with materials.
What he can do is impressive and even kind of science-y.
But now that we know the basis for his superpowers,
we can give him even more.
(mumbles)
So here are seven other superpowers that Magneto gets
simply from being the master of magnetism.
Magneto is always moving so slow, and that's because he has
to use a ton of power to levitate over
non-magnetic
stuff.
That is possible if you use a crap-ton of magnetic fields,
like this frog is experiencing.
But there is a way he can travel much, much faster.
Magneto could go to any pair of train tracks
in the world and start running.
Then, at some speed according to Lenz's law
and depending on the magnetic field underneath him,
he would begin to levitate
like a magnetically levitated train.
Then, he could create alternating magnetic fields
on the sides of him to accelerate him
up to hundreds of kilometers per hour.
If Magneto got clever, he could put iron filings
in thousands of pounds of putty.
Then, as in this video, he could use his magnetic fields
and powers to
animate
that mass and make it
a nearly indestructible sticky goll-um beast.
Having a power over magnetism is really a power
over electromagnetism and electromagnetic radiation
like visible light.
So using his magnetic fields, Magneto could bend light
around himself to become invisible whenever he wanted.
Oh
No!
As we've learned an electric field can create
a magnetic field and vice versa.
So facing a metallic enemy like Colossus or Wolverine,
Magneto could apply a huge magnetic field around them
which would induce an electric current
to flow through one of these guys.
Electric currents tend to make stuff hotter when they flow
through something.
So at some point, as in this video, the metal would melt,
meaning that Wolverine's bones
would turn straight into goo.
Remember that one time Magneto ripped
all of the adamantinum out of Wolverine's body?
Pretty cool.
Literally boiling Wolverine's skin off
because his bones are melting, even cooler.
If Magneto's magnetic fields were strong enough,
he could use them to force atoms
so close together that they actually fused
and released huge amounts of energy.
We try to do the same things with magnetic fields
in experimental fusion reactors
like you're seeing in this video.
So Magneto could single-handedly end the energy crisis.
Or and stick with me here, this gets a little complicated,
technically Magneto could create lightsaber!
The end of the world may come in the form
of a gamma ray burst, or a meteor strike, or global warming.
Or it could happen after humanity is plunged into chaos
following the loss of all of the world's electronics.
If Magneto used every ounce of his powers, he may be able
to disrupt the plasma flowing along the intense magnetic
field lines of the sun.
If he could, then Magneto could send a solar flare
directly at Earth with charged particles screaming
at a million miles per hour impacting all
of the world's electronics and creating
electric currents inside of them to fry them
and send us back to the Stone Age.
This is to scale.
(yelling)
Hey I just forgot all of X-Men: The Last Stand.
Nice.
Everything that you are, every thought you have,
every desire, every personality quirk that makes you, you,
is more or less the result of a storm of electrical signals
thundering around the neurons of your brain.
And as we've learned magnetic fields can alter
electrical signals, so magnetic fields
can mess with your mind.
And we know this to be true because we've studied it.
It's called transcranial magnetic stimulation,
and it can move your limbs without you willing them to do so
as you're seeing in this video.
We've also found that it can alter
your brain chemistry and help fight depression.
And it can turn off the parts of your brain
that reason morally.
This is in theory complete control over body and mind,
a power at least as strong as Charles Xavier's powers.
And Magneto has it.
So according to science Magneto should be able to do
way more than just move metal and levitate.
He could travel like a high-speed train.
He can melt Wolverine from the inside out.
He could control your mind.
And he could end the world.
Seems that Max is even more powerful
than we thought
because science.
You can't see it, but I'm levitating.
I assure you.
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Thank you so much for watching.
Follow me on Twitter @Sci_Phile to suggest ideas for future
episodes, on Instagram where I'm now posting
extra mini-episodes of Because Science.
And if you have any more science-y superpowers for Magneto
put them in the comments below.
Now this Saturday--shameless plug--I am hosting the new
MythBusters show, called MythBusters: The Search.
It airs Saturdays on the science channel.
You can catch the second episode this Saturday.
There's explosions.
What's incredible about magnetism if you think about it,
is that it cannot be fully understood
without quantum mechanics.
So when you see a magnet,
it's only
responding to magnetic forces and attracting
other things because of quantum mechanics.
This doesn't happen in everyday life.
We don't get to see how the universe works
at the smallest scales.
But things are only magnetic because charged particles are
moving around at the quantum scale, and those line up
with each other in the orbitals of atoms
in just the right way, so they don't cancel out.
And then those atoms all line up the right way
in regions and materials, and then regions and materials
all line up the right way to produce strong magnetic fields
that we can notice at our scale.
Magnetism is
a window
into the fabric of the universe, into how it really works.
And all of that you can get from a refrigerator magnet.
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