A question from the movie "Avengers:Infinity War" led to a discovery about the nature of human hand mechanics.
After watching the finger snap at the end of "Infinity War", biomolecular engineering researchers at George Tech decided to study it. There are lots ofspoilers below.
The movie ends with the villain, played by a heavily-CGI Josh Brolin, snapping his fingers and killing half the universe.
Georgia Tech chemical engineering undergraduate Raghav Acharya was perplexed by the question of how the hell does finger snapping work, even after watching the movie.
The mechanics of the complicated motion were not explored very much. So he dove in.
The idea of a "Goldilocks zone of friction" was discovered by Acharya and his team during their research, which was to determine how finger snapping works under various physical conditions.
The experiment depended on highspeed video footage of people snapping their fingers five times each. One person snapped their fingers while wearing a nitrile glove that was too slippery, another wore rubber thimbles on their thumb and forefinger, and another wore metal thimbles on their thumb and forefinger.
The experiment's control subject snapped their fingers and showed the researchers that it was just right.
Ars explained that finger snaps are a mechanism in which energy is loaded in a mass-spring system, held in place with a latch. All the stored potential energy is released when the latch is quickly released.
Researchers hope that this biomolecular breakthrough will lead to further study of the complex mechanics of hands and have applications forbioinspired robots.
The researchers determined that it was probably not possible for him to have snapped his fingers that way.
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The results suggest that the metal-armored fingers of the man could not have snapped. It is probably the Hollywood special effects that are at play.
Thank you, nerds!
Read more about why it wasn't possible for him to snap his fingers while wearing the gloves.
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