The world we live in inspires art and dream. Not one of us see the world the same as anyone else, we all have our own unique point of view and that view influences how we interpret our world. The differences depend on mood, noise, smell, the ambient light and countless other details that mean different things to different people on different days. It's incredibly subjective and individual to the individual.

But outside of whether a sound can make you feel cold or a shade of blue make a room feel warm, the world is distinctly measurable. It has size and movement, energy and rigidity, viscosity and entropy. This distinctly measurable and calculable part of our world is decidedly objective, and we describe the world around us and its workings as a wide and varied set of rules colloquially known as 'the Laws of Physics'.

Instinct

The beholders eye will find beauty in the dance of a childs balloon in the breeze, but the known values of the elements of the balloons nature and that of the fluid that surrounds it can be used to predict its path through the air. This relationship between art and science, though, is intertwined.

We instinctively know when something is wrong or false. Every time you see a computer generated character in a movie that hasn't been animated with performance capture, you know its not real. The motion is entirely wrong. In Captain America Civil War when T'Challa was the Black Panther you knew it was CGI, even though the materials of the costume looked real. The same goes for Spider-Man, Wonder Woman when she moved strangely in the bank in Justice League, Agamemnon's soldiers in Troy or even pets in ads, our brains know when something is not right and evidence from various studies suggest there is a reason for that.

The Maths of the Mind

Its almost universally known that our brains are incredibly complex. So complex in fact that it's communication systems have recently been discovered to work in between 7th and 11th virtual dimensional forms. Humans and animals alike are capable of automatically understanding the optimum point to enter a pool of water to get to a destination in the lowest possible time - something that requires a lot of complex mathematics to prove on paper. Even young children can understand the trajectory of a ball through the air and predict its destination.

The evidence is in abundance and it is clear, our brains often instinctively understand what has taken millennia to formulate into an equation; our brains understand the physics of the world around us, even if our minds have to be taught the code.

The Art

So when artists translate the world onto paper, they instinctively illustrate the world they know, the one encoded into their brains. Likewise, when the viewer/reader sees the animation or illustration, there is an instinctive plausibility attributed to the image(s) they see. It's why artists use perspective in their drawings, the cause and effect of extreme motions and accelerations, why they study the movement and postures of the body during various types of motion. It's meant to feel real, feel plausible, add the mundane as an anchor so the fantastic is grounded in reality.

The artists mind works unknowingly in the Laws of Physics, and the Laws of Physics are written in Maths.

The Limitation

It doesn't apply everywhere, however, the fantastic and incredible that make us want to read a comic or manga, or watch a cartoon, movie or anime are often beyond the real or calculable.

The beams of life-force energy, teleportation, the power to crush a black hole, the ability to transmute elements, bring the dead to life, or running faster than time. They are unquantifiable, often nonsensical, occasionally jump the shark, but are definitely what we are fans for - they are the feats that speak to our imagination rather than our sense of reality, and the world of physics does not belong there.

The Point

But Physics and Maths do have a place, within the limitations of reality. It might be fantastic that a character could jump to the edge of space, float for a time and then return to Earth, but the speed of the character can be estimated because every celestial body has an escape velocity. It may be incredible that a character could throw a stone pillar 1,300km, but ballistics can calculate the necessary initial velocity for that to happen. It may also be unimaginable to punch a chunk out of a micro-planet, but the force required to do so is entirely possible to discern.

Maths and calculating the feats of our favourite characters in fiction using the Laws of Physics can, and should be done within the limitations of those laws, because despite the people who exclaim that the writers and illustrators did not use the laws of physics to create these feats, the fact of the matter is, they kinda did - they just didn't know it.