I believe there is the unified theory of Superman’s powers where he actually has the ability to manipulate molecular structure of the object he touches.
He is shown picking up cruise ships and the ship doesn’t split in two, that’s because he’s strengthening the structure and making it lighter as he lifts it.
He causes the air around him to thicken and squeeze him through the sky.
He causes the air touching his eye balls to turn into hot laser beams.
So when Supes catches a falling human, he instantly makes them invulnerable to the sudden stop
The most famous (and internally consistent) version is control over inertia, not molecular structure.
I don’t agree with it because inertia alone can’t explain everything, but I think it’s the right track, in the form of some kind of general control over universal forces that manifests in a way he intuitively understands (unless we want to argue that all energy has inertia just as all mass does, in which case okay fair enough)
His varying power levels are both dependent on how much energy he has stored from the sun, because it is a specic EM wavelength that he can absorb and store, and how much control over the forces he can deliberately or intuitively exert.
This implies that his most powerful form is not the one that punches the hardest, but the one that realizes he doesn’t need to punch at all.
I always thought it would be neat if his super strength also meant very fine control, so he could do stuff like decelerate a plane with his bare hands, even if that’d be equal to an ant catching a paper mache egg filled with lead. Maybe when he catches someone, he manually decelerates each piece of them bit by bit, controlling where the waves of force go until they all cancel out and have zero inertia.
![Savior [Light Roast]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0d701124-5d9b-4ac7-95d4-a5bc943c39fe.jpeg){kind=link}
I believe there is the unified theory of Superman’s powers where he actually has the ability to manipulate molecular structure of the object he touches.
He is shown picking up cruise ships and the ship doesn’t split in two, that’s because he’s strengthening the structure and making it lighter as he lifts it.
He causes the air around him to thicken and squeeze him through the sky.
He causes the air touching his eye balls to turn into hot laser beams.
So when Supes catches a falling human, he instantly makes them invulnerable to the sudden stop
All this is done unconsciously on his part.
Also why he not immediately naked when going to superspeed in the outfit. It’s protected by the force bubble around him.
The most famous (and internally consistent) version is control over inertia, not molecular structure.
I don’t agree with it because inertia alone can’t explain everything, but I think it’s the right track, in the form of some kind of general control over universal forces that manifests in a way he intuitively understands (unless we want to argue that all energy has inertia just as all mass does, in which case okay fair enough)
His varying power levels are both dependent on how much energy he has stored from the sun, because it is a specic EM wavelength that he can absorb and store, and how much control over the forces he can deliberately or intuitively exert.
This implies that his most powerful form is not the one that punches the hardest, but the one that realizes he doesn’t need to punch at all.
I always thought it would be neat if his super strength also meant very fine control, so he could do stuff like decelerate a plane with his bare hands, even if that’d be equal to an ant catching a paper mache egg filled with lead. Maybe when he catches someone, he manually decelerates each piece of them bit by bit, controlling where the waves of force go until they all cancel out and have zero inertia.