How Fast Is The Flash and What Are the Consequences?

When it comes to super speed, most people would think of the one and only Flash. You can’t blame him, there doesn’t seem to be a limit to his speed whether it is Berry Allen or Wally West under the mask. But Having super speed isn’t as great as you probably think it is. I am fully aware that the speedsters in the comics have the speed force to help not break physics, but I would like to really show you how badly these speedsters destroy and just obliterate the laws of physics.

I know a lot of people have tried to tackle this question and a lot of people have probably used the same sources/ comic, but I’m going to calculate one more thing that will show that everyone in the DC universe should be dead due to our favourite scarlet speedster.

The Comics...

I would like you to take your time and read the comic strip above. Already you can probably see the problem here. This comic strip is great as it actually gives us some numbers to work with. Now, I’m going to make a couple assumptions first. It says that The Flash brought people out of the city one or two at a time. But I’m just going to assume that he's bringing people out two at a time since that will reduce the number of trips he takes in half. And I’m going to also assume that all the trips are 35 miles. Therefore 70 miles for him to go into the city and out with two people. Another assumption I made was that the flash was already at this max speed when he got into Korea. Hence there is no need to calculate acceleration, even though that would have turned out to be something crazy.

Now with that out of the way, we can do the math. We were told that The Flash was able to bring everyone out of the city in 0.00001 microseconds. Now that is quick, really quick. That is 0.00001×10^(-6) seconds. You probably can’t wrap your head around that, and I don’t blame you. On a stopwatch, that number would be displayed as 0.00000000001. That is a lot of zeros. Now we are told that there were 532,000 people in the city and assuming that the flash takes 2 at a time, that is 266,000 trips. Considering that each trip is 70 miles which is 112,654 meters, that means the flash ran a mind-blowing 2.997×10^10m in that time. Using a formula everyone should be familiar with, that means the speed he travelled at is the distance he travelled divided by how long it took him. Plugging these values into a calculator, you start to realise how badly he broke physics. Turns out, he was running at around 3×10^21ms^(-1). Just as a reference, he is travelling at around 10×10^12 times the speed of light. He was travelling 10 million, billion times the speed of light. WHAT!?

Now, that got me thinking since we have already broken physics, let's break it once more. Ignoring that fact that The Flash’s relative mass would be beyond infinity and the universe probably would have been destroyed that way, I’m going to show you another reason why everyone in the universe should be dead.

Now if we assume that Berry Allen was running in still wind, meaning that the wind isn’t blowing in any direction, that means that the most common atom he’s running through is nitrogen. We can easily calculate the mass of one nitrogen atom to be around 2.33×10^(-26) kg. Now, since Berry is travelling at such speeds and colliding with these atoms, we can assume that the atoms are colliding into him with the same force and hence they are travelling at the same speed. We can do this as we are just changing perspective and it would look like the atom is travelling that fast. Now using the formula 1/2 m(c_rms )^2=3/2 kT we can calculate the temperature of the air around The Flash. (Where T is the temperature and k is a constant.) Rearranging the formula and plugging it tells us that the temperature is around 5.04×10^39 k. Just to let you know, the max temperature is known as the Planck temperature and it is 1.41679×10^32 k. The Flash has caused the air around him to be 35.6×10^6 times hotter than the hottest temperature. The Flash did try to save everyone from a nuclear blast, but he ended up causing a mass extinction event that potentially just wiped out the entire universe due to how hot it was. FYI, the universe was 1×10^27 k when it was 10^(-35)seconds old. Just wrap your head around what the flash has done.

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