9

Marvel.com says Sue Storm has a power to bend all wavelengths of light and this way she becomes invisible.

Sue can render herself wholly or partially invisible at will. She can also render other people or objects invisible, affecting up to forty thousand cubic feet of volume.

She achieves these feats by mentally bending all wavelengths of light in the vicinity around herself or the target in question, and she somehow does this without causing any visible distortion effects; she also somehow directs enough undistorted light to her eyes to retain her full range of vision while invisible. - Source

The quote above also says she somehow does this without losing her eyesight.

Are there any references in the comics that explain how she does this? Or did they just jump into the story without giving somehow logical answer to that?

Community
  • 1
burcu
  • 7,944
  • 1
  • 31
  • 53
  • 5
    it seems the official source doesn't even know - given the use of "somehow" ;) – NKCampbell Mar 04 '16 at 16:25
  • 8
    How can Invisible Woman see? Very well, thank you. – Paul D. Waite Mar 04 '16 at 16:31
  • @amaretto Some would see two black holes floating in the air tho. – burcu Mar 04 '16 at 16:57
  • 6
    How does Cyclops generate his laser blasts? How does Wolverine have enough energy in is body to run his accelerated healing? How does Storm even do the things she does? They're superheroes; it just works. – Ellesedil Mar 04 '16 at 18:26
  • 3
    It's a secondary power, like super strength guys not busting their bones all the time. Hand-wavium is generally the answer. I wonder if her invisible retinas can process light that passes through them at certain angles, instead of just hitting them. –  Mar 04 '16 at 23:20
  • Just to complicate things, the ComicVine article (http://comicvine.gamespot.com/invisible-woman/4005-2190/) has references to her also being able to sense invisible objects and make them visible, and that her ability to turn things invisible is actually a form of energy manipulation. – FuzzyBoots Mar 04 '16 at 23:26
  • The # of comments here shows interest. Hopefully you'll get more upvotes! –  Mar 05 '16 at 05:26
  • Well, I'm not sure what you're asking. Distortion is present in all cloaking devices created to date, but in some cases it is pretty difficult to detect. Unless there is some fundamental physical minimum distortion, independent of the characteristics of the distorting device, is there any reason to think that Sue Storm's powers simply couldn't produce distortion below any reasonably visible threshold? – Adamant Mar 05 '16 at 06:43
  • I'm not sure whether the comics use this, but perhaps she simply absorbs some of the light that hits her retinas, and increases the intensity of the refracted light by an equivalent amount. Since she has force fields, presumably her powers create energy, or draw upon some external source. Quite frankly, the additional light needed to compensate for light absorbed by the retina (at visible wavelengths, anyway) could probably be produced even by biologically realistic mechanisms. So perhaps Sue's powers add the absorbed wavelengths back to the refracted light. – Adamant Mar 05 '16 at 06:52
  • Didn't you answer your own question? Apparently she directs the mininum amount of light needed to see to her eyes. What I want to know is what the range in wavelengths is she can manipulate. Can she deflect gamma radiation from a nuclear explosion? –  Mar 05 '16 at 09:32
  • @Hans That's what I'm asking. How does she do this? How this works? If we can find an answer for this, your question will be answered as well. Marvel only says "somehow" but doesn't explain how it works. – burcu Mar 07 '16 at 07:27
  • @Jonah I'm simply asking how she does this? "Being invisible" has lots of definition. But Marvel indicates she manipulates light to achive this. If there are any comic book references about this, we could start assuming things then. – burcu Mar 07 '16 at 07:30
  • @apollo Sorry for the long delay. You're assuming that there is a scientific explanation to begin with. There isn't. Superheroes aren't science-fiction, they're fantasy. Scientifically speaking, light can only be redirected ("bent") by spacetime distortion ("gravity"). Cloaking technology could be a science-fiction explanation, but that isn't the case here because somehow Sue Storm creates her invisibility by herself. So for her to be able to bend light she would have to be able to distort spacetime itself. If she could do that, invisibility would be the least of her powers. –  Apr 07 '16 at 01:52
  • @Hans I am well aware that this isn't actual science but fiction and fantasy, thank you very much. Therefore I am not looking for a scientific answer for that. Are there any references in the comics that explains how she does this? Or did they just jump into the story without giving somehow logical answer to that? Btw, sorry for the delay as well. – burcu May 03 '16 at 08:46
  • 2
    Closely related to http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1465/invisibility-should-cause-blindness-how-does-hard-sf-cope/1491#1491 – Major Stackings Jul 12 '16 at 05:53

2 Answers2

1

If she bind the rays of light to become invisible, it means that she has to bend every single one that whose direction go through her body (or the object she renders invisible) in order to avoid her body and then bend it exactly at the same angle and line it was comming initially (and so for every photon and at the speed of light).

So it must be easy to select a part of the photons that are going into her eyes and don't divert them so they hit her eyes (she is already calculating photon trajectory and diverting them twice and does so faster than light). So her eyes could appear like a little blur or a little darker spot, but could be nearly invisible if she only let a fraction of the original light...

So this power is somewhat physically possible if you accept FTL thinking and light bending ^^

max pnj
  • 1,341
  • 9
  • 18
0

Perhaps she only bends reflected light, outbound from hitting her body. She wouldn't be emitting and radiation to observe but she could still observe the incident light. On the other hand it's foolishness to try and apply science to Gold & Silver Age comic books, there's no reason not to call it magic.

Heremod
  • 489
  • 2
  • 8
  • 1
    I really don't get the down-votes for this. If she can see, this stands to reason that inbound light would have to be unaltered. – PoloHoleSet Jul 11 '16 at 16:39
  • if she bended (or nulled) the reflected the light after it hit her body, she would appear as a black spot... – max pnj Jul 12 '16 at 15:11