

“So, it’s probably the Hollywood special effects, rather than actual physics, at play! Sorry for the spoiler.” Skin counts in a snap “Our results suggest that Thanos could not have snapped because of his metal armored fingers,” says Acharya, first author of the study. When the fingertips of the subjects were covered with metal thimbles, their maximal rotational velocities decreased dramatically, confirming the researchers’ intuitions.

“The finger snap occurs in only seven milliseconds, more than twenty times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds.” “When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair,” says Bhamla, who studies ultrafast motions in a variety of living systems, from single cells to insects.
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However, the snap acceleration is the fastest human angular acceleration yet measured, almost three times faster than the rotational acceleration of a professional baseball pitcher’s arm. The rotational velocity is less than that measured for the fastest rotational motions observed in humans, which come from the arms of professional baseball players during the act of pitching. “When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair.”įor an ordinary snap with bare fingers, the researchers measured maximal rotational velocities of 7,800 degrees per second and rotational accelerations of 1.6 million degrees per second squared. They explored the role of friction by covering fingers with different materials, including metallic thimbles to simulate the effects of trying to snap while wearing a metallic gauntlet, much like Thanos. Using high-speed imaging, automated image processing, and dynamic force sensors, the researchers analyzed a variety of finger snaps. With the frictional properties of a metal gauntlet, they imagined it might be impossible. After collecting them all, he snaps his fingers and triggers universe-wide consequences.īut would it be possible to snap at all while wearing an armor gauntlet, the researchers asked? In the case of a finger snap, they suspected that skin friction played a more important role compared to other spring and latch systems. In it, Thanos, a villainous character, seeks to obtain six special stones and place them into his metal gauntlet.
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It posits that organisms depend on the use of a spring and latching mechanism to store up energy, which they can then quickly release.Īcharya and Bhamla felt a particular push to apply this framework to a finger snap after seeing the movie Avengers: Infinity War, released in April 2018 and produced by Marvel Studios.

The framework seemed to naturally apply to the snap. In earlier work, Bhamla, Ilton, and other colleagues had developed a general framework for explaining the surprisingly powerful and ultrafast motions observed in living organisms. “It’s really an extraordinary physics puzzle right at our fingertips that hasn’t been investigated closely.” “For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated with how we can snap our fingers,” Bhamla says.

Bhamla says the project is also a prime example of what he calls curiosity-driven science, where everyday occurrences and biological behaviors can serve as data sources for new discoveries. Their results might one day inform the design of prosthetics meant to imitate the wide-ranging capabilities of the human hand. The research was led by Raghav Acharya, an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech, as well as doctoral student Elio Challita, Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Mark Ilton, assistant professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. The results appear in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Using an intermediate amount of friction, not too high and not too low, a snap of the finger produces the highest rotational accelerations observed in humans, even faster than the arm of a professional baseball pitcher. Both media inspired a group of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology to study the physics of a finger snap and determine how friction plays a critical role. Today, that same snap initiates evil forces for the villain Thanos in Marvel’s latest Avengers movie. The snapping of a finger was first depicted in ancient Greek art around 300 BCE. Researchers have discovered the finger snap has the highest acceleration the human body produces. University Georgia Institute of Technology
