The science behind Spider-Man’s web-swinging – should he run instead?
By Daniel Wood
So, I was perusing the interwebs as it were and I stumbled upon this excellent article examining the science of Spider-Man’s iconic web-slinging. The article explores the speed and effectiveness of Spidey’s most-famous method of travel and poses the questions ‘does web-slinging actually save Spider-Man time’ and should he in-fact just run instead?
The article, which is on wired.com’s science blog Dot Physics posits that Spider-Man becomes a pendulum when he swings from a web As they put it “His motion is determined by the length of the web along with the starting angle. From a forces view, there is mostly just the tension in the web and the gravitational force pulling down on him. The key parameters to consider are the swinging angle, the time for one swing and the distance of one swing. Here’s a picture.
Courtesy of Wired.Com
The article uses that basic knowledge to expand upon Spidey’s swinging and judge whether or not he’d be better off running, or should he stick to the much cooler looking web-slinging. I’m not going to even attempt to post the full article here as it’s quite lengthy and scientific but it’s definitely interesting and 100% worth a read. So head over to wired.com’s science blog Dot Physics Spider-Man article now and enjoy it!
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