LUCID FORGE

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Someone once said that the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. But what happens when some enterprising scientists take fantasy and give it real world plausibility? Just follow the green footprints down the D-wing of the Ontario Science Centre and you’ll reach an elevator that appears to take you down into a top secret underground government lab. Instead the elevator actually drops you off in a back alley but it turns out that you’re not too far off from the lab. For just a short walk away is the Marvel Universe, all neatly laid out and explained with displays and diagrams. Be careful; you may actually learn something here.

Working with exhibitors Yellowbrick-Holman, the OSC has brought the Marvel Superheroes Science Exhibition to Toronto after a very successful run in Los Angeles. The Centre offered a first look to the media and a very lucky class from a local Toronto elementary school. “What this exhibition does is engages people,” said Science Centre CEO Lesley Lewis to the gathered crowd at the launch?s Q&A portion. “It takes the excitement of comic book heroes that are familiar to us all and through them enable us to teach people about the science and engineering that underlies the comic book heroes.?

According to Lewis, the Marvel exhibit is an example of the Science Centre’s commitment to help create exciting and innovative exhibits and is one of five other traveling exhibits touring across North America. In the case of this exhibit, excitement is generated through artwork from nearly 40 years of Marvel Comics. Thirty stations allow visitors an interactive experience where the various powers of characters like Spider-Man, Daredevil and the X-Men are explained using real science. “We’re really trying to bring the message of how the world of fantasy can be used as a launching pad when talking about real technology and how it?s relevant in our daily lives,” said Dr. Hooley McLaughlin, Senior Science and Technology Advisor.

Speaking strictly on the science, the Marvel-based displays deal with Magnetism, Genetics, Atmospheric Science, Cryogenics, Neuroanatomy, Biomechanics, and Chemistry. If you’re a school age and you hear your teacher list off these topics for study, thoughts will quickly drift to recess or, failing that, lunch. Magneto, Spider-Man, Storm, Iceman, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Daredevil though are a list of subjects worth study. Fortunately, every character has a correlation to a real-life science lesson.

Take everyone’s favourite Spider-Man for example, what better opportunity could there be to teach the kids a little something about Arachnology? (That’s a trick question.) Through Spider-Man, visitors can learn of the miracles of the Technora rope, a material only three millimeters in diameter but can hold over 3,000 lbs of weight, making it about eight times stronger than steel. Want to know why the Hulk turns mean and green when he gets angry? Take a frightening and educational trip into Bruce Banner’s brain to find out how our amygdalae trigger chemical changes in our bodies. The Science Centre, however, falls short of suggesting that gamma radiation has anything but poisonous effects on the human body.

Even someone with a passive knowledge of comics knows that Daredevil is blind, but can the other senses really compensate for lost sight? In the Daredevil “pavilion”, the curious can see if they can guess what an object is through touch or smell alone. They can also try using “echo location”, a technique of making clicking sounds with your tongue to navigate your way through a dark maze. Just a short walk over is an exo-suit that enables you to lift a Mazda CX-7. Just like the armoured suit of Iron Man, this display demonstrates how the U.S. Army is using hydraulics and engineering to create similar suits that allow wearers to lift several times their own weight.

Naturally, the X-Men provide several unique learning opportunities about Biology, mutation, and other scientific areas. You can learn how much in common human beings have with a fruit fly by guessing what percentage of DNA we share. In the next booth, Magneto teaches the principles of magnetism, while Wolverine shows kids that you don?t have to be a mutant to have metal parts. But these are just a few of the wonderful and often interactive displays. The joy of this exhibit is not just in lifting a car or guessing the smell of dirt or spurning an angry reaction Bruce Banner-style, but also in learning something practical. Someone once said that although we live in a society so exquisitely dependent on science and technology, very few of us are actually knowledgeable about such things. But here’s some science that allows all our pointless knowledge about comic book heroes feel useful.

For those who aren’t scientifically inclined, The Marvel Superheroes Science Exhibit is more powerful than a thousand science-fair volcanoes and about a million times more interesting. The exhibit will be at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto through March before continuing on to seven other North American cities over the next four years. So worry not true believers, a spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down after all.