Spider-Man, Spider-Man, may do whatever a spider can, but if Peter Parker covers all that ability up with a suit, would he still be an effective hero? This is what I’m deeming “the suit problem” — it’s implied that Spider-Man uses the same anatomy that spiders do to climb walls, but that anatomy is critically dependent on close contact with surfaces. If a suit got in the way of those tiny barbed hairs, in other words, wouldn’t wall-crawling be impossible?
In my latest Because Science, we’re taking the suit problem abdomen-on. Peter is a smart kid, a science whiz, so he would probably know that spiders take advantage of what are called Van der Waals forces when wall crawling. These forces are minuscule electric attractions that occur when atoms are very close together, despite being neutral. The forces are small, but add them up over literally millions of hair ends, and something spider-sized can stick to walls. But Peter would also know this wouldn’t scale up for a human teen…
So how does Spider-Man get around the suit problem? Check out my latest episode above to find out!
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