Calculating Spider-Man's Kinetic Energy: A Physics Exploration

good morning today our goal is to investigate this clip of spider-man to determine his

kinetic energy so let's commence operations energy is given by the formula half

times mass times speed squared and symbolically we write that as ek

equals half times m v squared mass is measured in the unit kilograms

speed is measured in the unit of meters per second now if we use those two units

we end up measuring kinetic energy in a unit called the joule

every equation in physics tells a story and this one tells a story as well it tells us that as

mass increases the kinetic energy of a person or an object will increase similarly it tells us as speed increases

kinetic energy also increases and so our goal is to get the kinetic

energy of spider-man and so researching the mass of the actor who portrayed spider-man

his mass was around 72 kilograms and so the challenge today will be to determine the speed

so what we've done is taken two frames from the previous clip i just showed you these two frames are 13 frames apart

the video is recorded at 24 frames per second dividing 13 by 24 the time

gap between the first picture here and the second picture is 0.5417 seconds

so we're going to try to determine that distance because it seems that spider-man in this

particular picture is standing right around there if we compare the two pictures

side by side and so we measure that distance with the ruler and we get 3.7

centimeters but now we need some sort of scale so we're going to use the height of the

actor who portrayed spider-man as a scale that white arrow we just drew is 1.7 centimeters long

but researching the actor's height his height is actually 1.73 meters and so doing some math we can determine

that the distance is 3.77 meters recalling that speed when it's moving at

a constant velocity or constant speed is distance over time

and we end up getting 6.96 meters per second and so substituting our quantities

mass of 72 kilograms and our speed of 6.96 meters per second spider-man's kinetic energy is forty

1744 joules writing this to two significant digits because we only know the mass two

significant digits and probably we only know the speed as well two significant digits

we end up getting around 1700 joules as a side note comparing spider-man speed

to that of a sprinter a sprinter can achieve a speed as high as 12 meters per second hope you enjoyed the video

have a great day