Astrophysicist Andy Howell looks at Marvel's FANTASTIC FOUR FIRST STEPS as a springboard for explorations of science and evaluates some of the scientific and technological aspects of the film.
Howell conflates three distinct phenomena and misattributes the film's errors. The visual resemblance to Interstellar's black hole is actually defensible: a non-accreting neutron star lensing background stars would produce a dark central region with Einstein rings, superficially similar to a black hole shadow, because both bend spacetime. His survivability comparison to Gargantua is a category error — a supermassive black hole's gentle tidal gradients are irrelevant to a neutron star, which kills via surface radiation and extreme tides, but the film never claims the Four survive naked proximity; Sue's force fields and Johnny's plasma state are established superpowers that the film uses as shielding, making Howell's "they should be dead" critique an assertion about power limits the film does not share. The slingshot terminology is sloppy, but the physics is reconstructable as an Oberth maneuver: the ship fires engines at periapsis where velocity is maximized, extracting multiplicative kinetic energy from the same fuel, reaching 0.88c efficiently while depleting reserves — which directly explains why they lack power later. The Surfer's "month" delay is not gravitational time dilation
15:50 johnny is not a dumb superhero. he is the least intelligent in a group that has one of the best human spaceship pilot, a master physicist and the smartest man in marvel universe.
not an astrophysicist but as a hobbyist with an interest in this stuff, isnt it absurd that they had plans to just... place the earth in a new solar system? assuming it's even possible (big assumption) they'd need to find a star extremely similar to the sun or else face an extinction level event due to the extreme difference in heat, light etc which the Earth's atmosphere wouldn't be adequate for. then there's orbits to consider; there's heaps of other objects in our solar system that influence what we know as a stable orbit. perhaps most important of all of those is the moon; they didn't transport the moon too, and without its gravitational influence (among other things) do we just not have tides anymore? wouldnt that lowkey destroy our marine ecology and heavily impact the climate?
Funniest thing is that you look a lot like Mr Fantastic from the comics. And i mean that as a compliment haha. Are you sure you do not actually stretch?
You’re forgetting one worm hole or a form of teleportation and teleportation can take many forms but I’ll give you a pass because we’re not sure how many method of teleportation there are because technically teleportation is just the ability to travel without moving
How is this channel not bigger! I love your content. It'd be great to see more of this. And maybe even some connections between your points and some deeper supporting material in the comments?
Totally agreed, but you forget talk about the time paradox when you travel close to speed light, or the 4 months that you need to achieve that velocity accelerating constantly at 4g.
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would love your much more educated input!
to be for them
what break-hroughs would be necessary to make the science of the film real?
4 Technologies from FF that are on the horizon
Dang
The Black Hole (1979)
Event Horizon (1997)
Gravity (2013)
Interstellar (2014)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
Contact (1997)
Solaris (1972)
Superman (2025)
Primer (2004)
Games:
Kerbal Space Program
Orbiter
Deliver Us the Moon
Deliver Us Mars
Moons of Madness
The Invincible
>drops this vid randomly
Nice