The Physics of Watchmen

Over at Newsarama is an interview with Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios, scientific advisor on the comic-based film Watchmen. Kakalios is a great choice because of his book The Physics of Superheroes, previously reviewed on this website, where he uses comic book superheroes as a means of exploring physics concepts.

Watchmen spans several years, so part of Kakalios' consultation has been in the look of the film, what a scientific lab would look like in 1959 or 1985, for example, as well as the bizarre quantum physics powers of Dr. Manhattan. Among other powers, Dr. Manhattan can exist in more than one place at a time and teleport as far away as Mars, and the film makers wanted to understand how that was possible.

The comic book doesn't go into much detail about the science behind the powers, but presumably these aspect of his powers would be related to the ability of a particle to exist in more than one place at a time, as exhibited by the classic double slit experiment. This phenomena is explained by the idea of wave particle duality, wherein a particle's location is defined not as a precise point by its entire quantum wavefunction, which represents its possibility of existing in different locations at a given time.

While this effectively means that in some cases a particle must be treated as being in more than one place simultaneously, the fact is that when experiments are conducted to actually find a particle the result is always that the particle is in one location. Dr. Manhattan appears able to extend this to encompass his entire body, and also to actually affect things in a more extended way than is possible with "ordinary" quantum physics. And that, of course, is why Dr. Manhattan is fictional ... but highly entertaining.