Dennis O’Neil: Superman, Spider-Man, and the God Particle
First, the good news. Scientists are prepared to say that, definitely, god exists.
Now the bad. (He) (she) (it)…oh dang, there are really no appropriate pronouns for a concept that transcends the very idea of gender. Let’s settle for “they” and start again: They – the god thingies – are called “Higgs bosuns,” nicknamed “god particles,” and they permeate the universe. And without them, nothing could exist, could ever have existed. (Unless, that is, there’s a kind of reality we can’t comprehend, and we’re not exactly willing to rule that out, but we’ll never know and anyhow, who cares?) Although physicists have been seeking the Higgs for a half-century because the accepted model of the universe indicated that the things had to be there, it wasn’t until July 4 that they were prepared to say, yep found it. I understand that there was some celebrating in the Land of Labs.
Me, I got my science fix when I went to see The Amazing Spider-Man at the local monsterplex and, later, caught a few minutes of Superman on the tube: the first big-budget Superman, released in 1978 and hyped with the line, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” (For the record, I didn’t.) That flick has flaws, but it’s pretty good, especially for something made when Hollywood was just beginning to learn how to make these kinds of entertainments. The only part I really dislike is the ending: the graphics, though they tell the story, are pretty crude compared to what’s preceded them. And the science…oh woe – the science. (If you want to consider this a spoiler alert, suit yourself.) Lois Lane dies in an earthquake and Superman flies counterclockwise around the Earth and thus – ready for this? – reverses time and goes back to before Lois died and happy endings all around.
Reverses time, does he? By flying counterclockwise. Uh huh.
Nothing in the Spidey flick is quite so nettlesome, but in this reinvention, the film folk chose to explain Spidey’s ability to shoot webs huge distances and make them, apparently, as strong as the occasion warrants the same way Stan Lee and Steve Ditko explained it in the first Spider-Man comic book story, way back in 1962: A teenage Spidey, who gets really good grades in science class, having acquiring amazing powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider, goes home and, you know, tinkers around and comes up with a gadget that a) does the web shooting stuff and b) is compact enough to be worn like an oversize wrist watch.
So: if he commanded such technology, why didn’t he use it for much greater good than he could achieve as a costumed vigilante and, incidentally, plunk his saintly Aunt May down in some swell digs?
For the same reason that Superman didn’t use his godlike time reversal stunt to undo every single bad thing on the whole planet? (I mean saving Lois was nice and all, but…war! Famine! Disease!)
Of course, this kind of story is basically fantasy and, I guess, we all have a private setting for our willing suspension of disbelief. I complain about plot devices that violate the story’s own “reality” and haul us out of the fiction while we try figure out how we’re supposed to accept what we’ve just seen.
Since, in superhero writing, there is a long tradition of writers using whatever’s in the zeitgeist at the moment, I expect we’ll be seeing some costumed dogooder involved with Higgs bosuns pretty soon. I hope I don’t have to mangle my willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy the story, god particle or no god particle.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
“So: if he commanded such technology, why didn’t he use it for much greater good than he could achieve as a costumed vigilante and, incidentally, plunk his saintly Aunt May down in some swell digs?”
One problem I had with Spiderman is the fact that he continued to work for that jerk Jameson as a photographer. I thought Parker was supposed to be budding scientist. To me, it seems that the spider bite gave him not only superpowers but stunted emotional development.
Supes actually gets a pass from me on two fronts:
1) That “world spinning backward” thing was, obviously I thought, meant to signify that Superman was looping his timeline backward; Einsteinian physics does imply that if you were able to exceed the speed of light in an Einsteinian plenum (which would require greater-than-infinite energy, but this is Supes we’re talking about), entropy would reverse, and you’d travel back in time.
2) This isn’t a trick you’d want to use very often; unless you have perfect knowledge (which Supes didn’t, even in the movies), you run an unacceptably high risk of changing something in your own history that could prove disastrous. (What if, while flying down to save Lois, he’d accidentally nudged that missile so that it hit in a different place than it had last time, and his past self was in the wrong place to save anyone?)
Peter, however – why has he not founded Parker Chemical, and started manufacturing webshooters for the use of police and military forces? (The MPs at our local Army base, for instance, would *love* to have a level of engagement of intruders somewhere between “yelling” and “shooting”…)
There’s a great Concrete story in which he ends up developing a law-enforcement subduement device called “the hugger” that approximates Concrete’s own body size and arm reach.
Basically, a cop wears it, slowly approaches someone who needs to be restrained and hugs him until he calms down or can be cuffed. It’s the step between “words” and “tasing” on Concrete’s flow chart.
Aside from clockwise/counter-clockwise time travel, the comics had also established that Supes could travel back but not change the past – when he tried to save Lincoln, Luthor just happened to be time-traveling, too, thought Superman was there for him, and hit him with green K that took him out of action just long enough for Lex to make his escape.
Which was. of course, just enough time for Booth to pull the trigger.
Of course, this means that even if his traveling back was established in the comics as possible, he couldn’t have saved Lois anyway…
Of course, traveling backward in time by flying counter-clockwise had been established in the comics at some point – flying clockwise to break the Time Barrier forwards…