sophia_sol | Magnetism and death

I was talking with a friend the other night about a bunch of stuff, I don't even know what all, and the subject came up that magnetism can actually kill you. Like, apparently if you are in the presence of a strong enough magnetic field (it would have to be REALLY RIDICULOUSLY strong) it will mess with the electro-whatever processes in your brain and your body enough to kill you.

So immediately of course this made me think that Magneto should be able to easily just kill people with a wave of his hand -- because he controls magnetic fields. So he could just be like, OKAY SUPER STRONG MAGNETISM DIRECTLY AROUND THIS PERSON AND NOWHERE ELSE and they'd just fall over dead. No need for brute force or anything! Which means, of course, that Magneto shouldn't actually have had any trouble killing Shaw. Shaw controls kinetic energy, which is an entirely different thing. Shaw couldn't have done a thing about Magneto creating a strong enough magnetic field around him that it just plain killed him.

Of course, it's entirely possible Magneto simply hasn't yet figured out this is within the range of his abilities. But dude. Seriously. He should, because that is pretty badass and also a really effective terrorism tactic: "Look, I can kill you without moving a thing. I can make you just fall over dead with not a mark on you." And Magneto's supposed to be kind of a terrorist, given the progression of the other movies in the X-Men series.

So that's, you know, a thing. And I want fic for it. Maybe him figuring out he can do it? Maybe Charles figuring out Erik could do it? IDEK, but I'm pretty sure there's a good fic hiding in there somewhere.

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And there's the idea that because chemical bonding is magnetic that he could kill a person just by having their atoms all separate. Poof. No more bonding. (I wish I'd come up with that! I just remember reading it somewhere.)

Ooh! That is also a very shiny idea!

...I should not find this delightful. I am pretty sure that is the wrong reaction! Self, stop hanging out with fictional supervillains.

But yes! I think you are right! Also, I think I recently came across a discussion of how Magneto constantly messing about with magnetic fields would probably screw with his own brain quite a bit, so any of his more -- excessively supervillainy things could potentially come about because his powers have done alarming things to his brain.

Anyway, mostly I find all of this SO COOL TO THINK ABOUT.

You should ABSOLUTELY find this delightful! I mean, I clearly did, or I wouldn't have made a whole post about it. :D

And ooh, you're right, I bet it HAS screwed with his brain! That is so fascinating too! Now I really want fic about this EVEN MORE.

Basically SCIENCE IS AMAZING and when you have sciency powers, there is so much cool stuff out there that can be done with it beyond the obvious, because science can be pretty MAD sometimes.

Putting on the Watsonian hat to say that, yes, he probably just hasn't figured it out yet. Switching to the Doylist hat it seems like a bit of an oversight, but then again it almost makes it too simple :oP

Haha, yes, it's always fun to look at stuff like this from both a Watsonian and Doylist perspective!

Although - while just making people drop dead is scary, I don't know that it nessecarily creates the same terror as his usual grandoise displays. Terrorism is by defnition big and spalshy and messy, or it doesn't work - there's no such thing as subtle terrorism.

So on the one hand, he can make people drop deap. Dropping dead can theoretically be passed off as co-incidence or a poorly timed heart attack or whatever, and even if you can't handwave it away it's still a subtle sort of attack. Particularly, I think, if there isn't a mark on the person. If they start bleeding from the eyes or seizuring or something, then we're starting to get back into the terrorism range, because it's getting messy and horrer-terror inducing.

The other way to make it terrorism is to kill a LOT of people with it, simultaneously - which, X2 notwithstanding, actually doesn't seem to be Magneto's style. A truly terror-inducing attack is, on some level, random. Part of the horrer of it is that you don't know where or when it might happen, which is how you end up with people just sort of hiding in their homes. Magneto isn't random. He'll kill anyone who gets in his way, and when the oppertunity to tidily eliminate all humanity presented itself he didn't ignore it, but he's also not just bombing randomly selected crowds of civilians for shits and giggles. Mass murder is a means to an end for him, not the end itself.

So to be terrifying, his attacks have to rely on flash and scale rather than randomness. And over here on the other hand, a hailstorm of metal chunks just screams out LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME I'M A MOTHERFUCKING MUTANT COWER BEFORE MY MIGHT. It's flashier, and on many levels an attack carried out like this is way scarier even if he doesn't actually kill anyone, especially within the mutant-phobic world context Magneto lives in.

So perhapes early on, during the Shaw-hunting days, he just hasn't figured it out - I mean, he was still pretty shaky with his powers in general, as I recall. And then later, it just doesn't suit his style.

Um - did this make sense? I sort of typed it up in a series of thirty-second chunk while waiting for stuff to load. NOT the most effective method for ensuring coherent post flow. OH WELL.

Also, it was Token Conservative Friend who we were chatting to (...someday I'll have to get him a real psuedonym) and he was explaining why electricity and magnetism are not the same thing, using the example of how magnetic forces can frell your brain, stemming from our discussion of why a Farraday cage glove probably can't prevent your tranhumanist fingertip magnets from getting ripped out of your hands by a sufficently strong magnetic force. Which is... actually surprisingly relevant to where this thought-train ended up?

Yes, actually, it DOES make sense! A lot more sense than my vague thoughts about terrorism... So, thanks!

Um... science!intervention time.

Shaw controls kinetic energy, which is an entirely different thing.

Not really, no. Kinetic energy is our way of representing the energy of motion in equations. it doesn't matter what scale that motion is on- whether it's the Earth moving in its orbit, a bullet leaving a gun, an electron rotating around an atom, the math works roughly the same. Magnetic energy is not very well understood, really, but it seems to have something to do with the motion of subatomic particles, and its kinetic energy can be calculated using a variety of statistical approaches.

If we're understanding Magneto to have the ability to manipulate magnetic fields at any scale, then we ought to understand Shaw's ability to manipulate kinetic energy to exist at any scale, too. Of course, kinetic energy is so fundamental that it probably has something do with whatever quantum handwave Marvel's come up with this week to explain Charles's telepathic powers, too, but... I'm coming to my real point now, which is:

Comic books do not operate according to physics. They operate according to comic book physics. It's not even that we don't have a person who can do what Erik can, it's that we cannot even conceive of building a machine that can do what Erik does. Magnets and magnetic fields do not work that way. Which is fine- comic books don't abide by physics, they establish in context the rules by which the particular story they are writing operates. But trying to invade comic book physics with real physics ideas is probably unworkable- what we could just as easily see happen in a comic book is Erik reads a physics book and learns that strong magnetic fields can stop the human body and then he tries it and learns that something about the way the quantum entanglement of the atoms of a human body works prevents his magnetic power from working in that case. It's equally plausible because neither result actually makes sense in the real world.

So yeah, interesting fic idea, but don't make the mistake of thinking it's real physics and the creators of XMFC screwed up.

Haha, no, I'm well aware that comic book physics is not the same as real-world physics! I just thought it would be an interesting thing to try to apply to the way Magneto's powers work.

But anyways, thanks for the more in-depth explanation of kinetic energy etc, because yeah, it's clear I'm Not A Scientist....

Magnetism and death

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