If you watched the new "Star Trek" reboot, you had to chuckle when two heroes were plummeting toward terra firma at terminal velocity and were beamed aboard the Enterprise in the nick of time, suffering barely a bump.  And that business about hiding behind Titan...okay, maybe that could work.

But that was science fiction, it gets a free pass.  Superhero movies, though, had better get it right.

In "Batman Begins", Batman's cape solidifies when a current is passed through it, and it enables him to glide from tall buildings, but that would simply make a big splat, say physicists from the University of Leicester whose paper's press release made it to my inbox just in the nick of time.(1)

Ian Griffiths, Gareth Douglas, David Marshall, and Tom Hands aren't simply ironically griping about pop culture, they did some arithmetic and determined Batman's wingspan to be 4.7 meters.  Then they calculated if he jumped from a building 150 meters in the air, he could glide for 350 meters, they say,  but as he descends his velocity would increase. They see no way for him to be under 50 miles per hour when he reaches the ground, which is obviously too fast to land safely.


Credit: A2 9 Trajectory of a falling Batman

It is also obviously why these guys are not Batman.  Batman can't use a parachute, it would be like James Bond not having sex because he spends a lot of time in Haiti and doesn't have a condom. It just isn't done. And for non-Batman's that cape would have to be huge but he pulls the whole thing off.

I don't know how he does it, but he does it. Maybe he discovered the Higgs boson before the LHC.  If, as some journalists claim, it will lead to teleportation and faster-than-light travel, it could surely deposit Batman safely behind some bad guys.

Citation: Marshall, D.; Hands, T.; Griffiths, I.; Douglas, G.. A2_9, 'Trajectory of a falling Batman', Physics Special Topics, North America, 10 9 12 2011.

NOTE:

(1) A cliché which allows me to invoke another fictional hero, Malcolm Reynolds, from the inconsistent, and short-lived, "Firefly" television show, which at least gave us this 'Big damn heroes, sir' quote. Bonus: Nathan Fillion stole my haircut for the role.