12 Superheroes Ranked By Science (From Lame To Awesome)

5. The Flash

The student's go into a fair amount of detail regarding The Flash, with no fewer than four papers on the quick footed superhero.

First of all, we come back to the issue of energy. Scientists love energy. In the paper A model to determine the maximum instantaneous speed of The Flash, they calculate the maximum speed that The Flash should be able to reach, given his daily dietary intake as depicted in the CW incarnation. Unusually, given that we tend to find that superheroes expend a lot more energy than they consume, they found that this version of The Flash should actually be able to run nearly three times faster than is stated in the show (or just get very fat, very quickly).

There is a downside to all this, however, as outlined in The Flash: Hero or Villain?. The speed at which the Flash moves has the potential to cause extreme harm to civilians such as when "a cyclist is almost struck by a taxi, but is pushed to safety by The Flash. Upon studying the footage, it was postulated that this act occurs at such a speed that the impact may be more damaging than if the cyclist had been hit by the taxi."

So, in order to prevent himself from reducing the cyclist to red mist, The Flash would have to decelerate at a breathtaking rate. Unfortunately, this would probably cause his brain to come flying out of his eye sockets with the momentum, but you can't win them all, can you?

Read more:

Vol 4 (2015), JIST, Modelling the mutation rate of The Flash in context

Vol 4 (2015), JIST, A model to determine the maximum instantaneous speed of The Flash

Vol 13, No 1 (2014), PST, The Flash: Hero or Villain?

Vol 14, No 1 (2015), PST, The Flashs Sole Problem