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On December 10, 2020, I began an extended Twitter thread riffing off of Gail Simone's running joke that Scott Summers, aka Cyclops of the X-men, had heat vision rather than "concussive blasts" as is his official power depicted as red beams coming from his eyes.
This is a reprint of it, more or less.
Long thread inspired by @GailSimone
TLDR: Cyclops’ eyes burn with the heat of tens of millions of suns.
(With diagrams and equations!)
Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, the occasional leader of the X-men, is known for his “Optic Blasts”, but as Gail is happy to point out, these blasts are not some concussive force as indicated in the text of the comics, but rather they are heat vision.
In this model, we attempt to show what requirements would be placed on Cyclops’ heat vision - through physics.
One of the clearer demonstrations of Scott’s powers comes from the moment of their first use, when he, and his brother Alex (aka Havok) are falling from their father Christopher (aka Corsair)’s airplane with a single burning parachute.
In the rush of adolescent adrenaline, Scott’s X-factor activates and his eyes blaze forth with light - and are able to cushion the Summers brothers’ fall.
Heat rays, clearly, come in the form of light, and while you, dear reader, may not feel the light from your overhead lamp beating down upon you, it most assuredly is - just not that much.
Each photon of light carries with it momentum, and the rate with respect to time at which that momentum is emitted, is equal to the force the light pushes back on the light source.
Here in Figure 1, we determine the momentum of one photon of light from Cyclops’ eye ray.
The momentum (p) = Planck’s constant (h) / the wavelength of the photon.
And while the visible portion of the light spectrum that we, dear reader, can see in Cyclops’ beams is red, much of the rest of it may come in the IR part of the spectrum that we perceive as heat.
Still we will model the light as if it is a deep red and in doing so determine that the momentum of one such photon is 9.4 x 10^-28 N s.
Next we must consider the other forces acting upon Scott and Alex. The principle two of which are weight and drag. Drag involves a variety of factors:
* The coefficient of drag (C), which for falling people is around 1.
Drag also depends on:
* The density of air (it’s a rho, not a p) which is around 1.2 kg/cubic meter
* speed and
* cross-sectional area
See Figure 2
For cross-sectional area we shall assume spherical Summers’ brothers with a radius of 0.5 meters, which results in a cross-sectional area of 0.78 square meters.
See Figure 3
For speed, despite Scott’s head injury leading to his lack of control over his eye beams, we’ll assume a relatively safe 5 miles per hour for terminal velocity, which in S.I. metric units is about 2.2 meters per second
See Figure 4
All of these combine to yield a force of a mere 2.3 newtons.
Drag = 0.5 C rho A v^2
Drag = 0.5(1)(1.2)(0.78)(2.2)^2 = 2.3 N
Assuming that Scott, soon to be known as “Slim”, and his younger brother while in their early teens/tweens are a combined 100 kg in mass, their weight becomes 9800 newtons.
See Figure 5
Terminal velocity occurs when the acceleration on a falling object is zero, and weight is balanced by other forces. At this speed, drag is minimal, and so the force from Cyclops’ photons must be about the same as his and his brother’s weight.
See Figure 6
The force from the photons must equal the momentum sent with them divided by the time taken to do so.
This is the momentum from one photon times the number of photons emitted per second.
The necessary amount to brake their fall is 10^31 photons per second.
See Figure 7
Power is the rate of energy flow with respect to time, which for Cyclops’ heat vision is the energy per photon times the number of photons per second.
Energy for a photon is Planck’s constant times the wave frequency, which is also the photon’s momentum divided by the speed of light.
This yields a photon energy of 2.8 x 10^-19 J, and a power of 2800 gigawatts, or about 2300 flux capacitors.
See Figure 8.
The power flux is power per unit area, so we must determine the surface area of Scott’s eyes.
Modeling them as ellipses with a major axis of 3 cm and a minor axis of 1.5 cm, we determine his total open eye area to be 0.0007 square meters.
See Figure 9
Given the previously determined 2.8 terawatts of power, this yields about 4 petawatts per square meter, i.e. 4 x 10^15 W/m^2
See Figure 10
In contrast, the light flux from the Sun at our distance is 1370 W/m^2, which tells us that Cyclops eyes put out nearly 3 trillion times as much light as the Sun at this distance.
See Figure 11
Perhaps saying that his eyes burn with the heat of 3 trillion suns is a bit much. If instead we look at the 65 million W/m^2 the Sun puts out at its surface we can then confidently state that Cyclops’ eyes burn with the heat of 61 million Suns.
See Figure 12.
Of course, really, they're concussive blasts.
I continued the thread a few weeks later and looked at Concussive Blasts
And had another thread spawned off of one of Gail Simone Tweet about Travel By Electricity
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