WIKIMEDIA, ANDY AND LISA REELIn the movie Spider-Man 2, released in 2004, the eponymous hero fires out a web to bring a runaway subway train to halt, saving the lives of hundreds of grateful passengers. Now, a team of graduate students from the United Kingdom has calculated that real spider silk is in fact strong enough to stop a hurtling train, reported Wired Science. The paper—called “Doing whatever a spider can”—is published in the latest volume of the University of Leicester’s Journal of Physics Special Topics, in which fourth year Masters of Physics students at the university are encouraged to tackle off-the-wall subjects.
First, they worked out that the force required to bring four New York subways cars carrying 984 people to a stop is roughly 300,000 Newtons. Then, taking into account the geometry of the front of the train and the subway passage the web would have to anchor to, the students calculated that the stiffness of the web would have to be 3.12 gigapascals—well within the 1.5–12 gigapascals range of the silk webs produced by orb-weave spiders. And finally, the toughness required was almost 500 megajoules per cubic meter; a figure matched by the giant slink constructions of Darwin’s Bark spider (Caerostris darwini), the orb-weave spider with the strongest known webs.
So, they concluded, the strength of the web portrayed in the movie is proportional to ...
