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Johannes Diderik van der Waals: 1837–1923

Spider-Man science

A scene from Spider-Man 2 shows a train full of passengers careering towards certain doom, but Spider-Man intervenes just in time. Could Spider-Man swing from a silk thread, and could he use his thread to stop a train?

The terms in bold link to topics in the AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC and CCEA A-level specifications, as well as the IB, Pre-U and SQA exam specifications.

Calculations involving energy and equations of motion, together with estimates of quantities, enable us to compare the tensile strength, Young modulus and toughness of Spider-Man’s silk with that of real spiders.

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Johannes Diderik van der Waals: 1837–1923

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