Spiderman's Web IS Real: It's Strong Enough To Stop A Moving Train, Say Physics Students

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Students have discovered Spiderman's web is strong enough to stop a moving train | Marvel

Superheroes' powers are usually pretty far-fetched, but after research into spider webbing it seems they are not quite as unbelievable as they seem.

In Spiderman 2, there is a dramatic scene where the superhero stops a runaway train with his spider webbing. Now, a group of physics students is claiming a spider's web really could stop a moving subway car.

According to the University of Leicester masters students, the strength of Spiderman's web "would be proportional to that of real spiders".


The moment Tobey Maguire uses his spider web to stop a train

The group of three fourth-years calculated the material properties of webbing needed to stop four crowded subway carriages.

Their paper, "Doing whatever a spider can", was published in the latest volume of the University of Leicester’s Journal of Physics Special Topics.


The students found the force Spiderman's webs exert on the train to be 300,000 newtons.They were then able to calculate the strength and toughness of the webs.
They found the Young’s modulus [or stiffness, to you and I] of the web would be 3.12 gigapascals. As spider's silk ranges from 1.5 gigapascals to 12 gigapascals in the orb-weaver spiders, the students decided the possibility of the train stunt would be "very reasonable".


The Physics Special Topics journal is published every year, and features original short papers written by students in the final year of their four-year Master of Physics degree.


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