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Fans of comic books are used to having their disbelief suspended by superheroes, but at least one famous Spider-Man moment holds true to physics.

In the 2004 movie Spider-Man 2, the titular character stops a moving subway train using only his spider silk. The moment sounds (and looks) ridiculous but, according to some student physicists in the United Kingdom, it would be with within the bounds of physics.

According to the Huffington Post, James Forster, Mark Bryan and Alex Stone came to this conclusion by starting with how quickly the train can go at full speed. They also needed to determine how much force it takes to stop a powered R160 subway car, the time that the train takes to come to a complete stop and how much force was necessary to actually stop the vehicle.

They found that Spider-Man's webs would need to exert a force of 300,000 newtons to stop four train cars filled with nearly 1,000 passengers, LiveScience reports. That would require the silk strands to have a stiffness of 3.12 gigapascals. Considering that spider's silk ranges from 1.5 to 12 gigapascals for the orb-weaver spider, the student physicists found that the stunt was within the realm of physical limits.

Interestingly, though the stiffness of the silk was on the weaker end of the spectrum, it would need be as tough as the strongest known webbing of the orb-weaver spider. The students calculated that the silk needed to be as tough as about 500 megajoules per cubic meter.

The students' work was published in the University of Leicester's Physics Special Topics journal. It is published every year and is filled with short papers from fourth-year Master of Physics students. The exercise is intended to encourage students to think creatively and to have an idea of the peer-reviewed process.

It seems, then, that there is scientific basis for the assertion that spider's silk is stronger than steel.

A video of the stunt can be found below.