With a finger snaps you can beat a song, call your butler, or make half of humanity disappear. Well, the second thing you can only do if you are a person who thinks they can call a human being as if it were a puppy and the third if you are Thanos and you have the gauntlet appropriate. But could we still do it if we had the favorite complement of this villain from The Avengers from Marvel?
That is precisely what has been commissioned to analyze a team of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Well, the truth is that the study, published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, it does not focus solely on that. Rather, it analyzes the finger snap physics, with two different purposes. On the one hand, understand others extremely fast biological movements, like that of the jaws of termites. And, on the other, to improve the design of hand prosthesis much more realistic, capable of performing even the most complex gestures.
But they haven’t forgotten about Thanos. They have also taken into account his gauntlet and, in fact, have concluded that it would have been very difficult to generate a good click. Especially one that would turn the entire universe upside down.
The finger snap spring
The general research of these scientists is based on the analysis of the ultrafast movements of the living organisms.
Broadly speaking, they had verified that these are due to a spring and hook mechanism, through which a large amount of energy is stored, which is then abruptly released.
They wanted to focus on the snapping of human fingers, with particular attention to the role that friction. They were varying the friction between the fingers, placing the volunteers gloves of different materials and analyzing the movement with the help of high-speed imaging, automated image processing, and dynamic force sensors. Thus, they measured the Rotation speed of the fingers in the movement, checking that with the bare fingers the maximum rotation speed reached the 7,800 degrees per second, while the rotation acceleration came to 1.6 million degrees per second squared.
The speed of rotation was very high, but it did not reach the highest known in humans: the arms of a professional baseball batter. However, the instantaneous angular acceleration was indeed above that achieved with this sporty movement.
Furthermore, they saw that the clicking occurs in only 7 milliseconds. Much faster than, for example, a blink of eyes, what happens in 150 milliseconds.
All this is very interesting in order to understand the movement of the snapping of fingers and apply it to bio-inspired prostheses or robots. But we know that many people have entered this article to read what about thanos and The Avengers. Let’s see then what is the conclusion they reached.
Thanos’ snap would not be so bad
As we have seen, they analyzed the snapping of the fingers of the volunteers with gloves made of different materials. Among them, the metal, as it is the material from which the gauntlet used by Thanos at the end of the saga of The Avengers.
And the result was much less spectacular than the one produced by the villain. Not because of the absence of destruction and the disappearance of 50% of the population, which was to be expected. But because it was very difficult to perform the finger snap. In fact, the rotational speeds with this material were drastically reduced. Scientists believe this is partly because the compressibility of the skin is reduced. And it is that, as explained in a release one of the study authors, Elio Challita, “Reducing both the compressibility and friction of the skin makes it much more difficult to build up enough force in the fingers to actually snap”
Interestingly, this result, although not so remarkable, also occurred with rubber gloves. Therefore, they came to the conclusion that it was not good not much or little friction. If there was little, not enough energy could be stored to power the click. On the other hand, if it was a lot, too much energy would be dissipated in the form of heat as the fingers slide over each other.
It seems, then, that the ideal is snap bare fingers. Therefore, we could say that Thanos the gauntlet not only would not help him, but it would even harm him. But, let’s see, accusing Marvel of fanciful for doing the finger snap of the villain of The Avengers unrealistic is like accusing Disney that the fairy godmother of Cinderella be a black man. The wonderful thing about cinema and fantasy is that anything can happen. And that, to avoid real life, is always a wonderful option.