Thanos' infamous snap in Avengers: Infinity War wiped out half of all life in the universe, but a team of researchers discovered that the snap itself would not have been physically possible -- at least not while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.
As reported by Ars Technica, a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface partially explored the biomechanics of Thanos' infamous finger snap and attempted to answer the following question: could Thanos actually snap his fingers in the cumbersome, metal Infinity Gauntlet? According to the researchers at Georgia Tech, the answer is no.
One of the paper's co-authors, Saad Bhamla, an engineer at Georgia Tech, who has been studying the physics behind the finger snap for years, became convinced after watching Infinity War that Thanos would not have been able to produce a snap while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet, and friction was a large part of the reason why. "For the past few years, I've been fascinated with how we can snap our fingers," said Bhamla. "It's really an extraordinary physics puzzle right at our fingertips that hasn't been investigated closely."
Bhamla and his co-authors hypothesize in their research that friction plays a vital role in the mechanics of a finger snap, particularly the friction created between the skin of the middle finger and thumb. In the research, Bhamla et al. state that the arm muscles serve as a motor for the tendons in the fingers, which are loaded with potential energy (like springs). When someone goes to snap their fingers, the force built up by pressing the middle finger and thumb together is released when the middle finger slides past the thumb and hits the palm, thus creating the snap.
In a series of experiments, designed to measure the mechanics and motions of the finger snap, the researchers recorded three different subjects snapping their fingers with three different surfaces; a lubricated nitrile glove, latex rubber thimbles on their fingers and metal thimbles on both fingers underneath a nitrile glove. When snapping one's fingers with just human skin, the snap "occurs in only seven milliseconds, more than twenty times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds," Bhamla said. However, the lubricated glove was too slippery to create enough friction or store enough energy; the rubber thimbles produced almost too much friction, with all of the potential energy lost to the heat created; and the metal thimbles could not build up enough energy to produce a snap at all, making Thanos' infamous snap physically impossible.
"Our results suggest that Thanos could not have snapped because of his metal-armored fingers," said co-author Georgia Tech undergraduate Raghav Acharya. "So, it's probably the Hollywood special effects, rather than actual physics, at play. Sorry for the spoiler."
Source: Ars Technica
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