"....Norse mythology and Marvel Comics tell us that Mjolnir is composed of “uru metal,” forged ages ago by the blacksmith Etri in the heart of a dying star. Presumably uru metal is magical in nature, and thus conveys the enchantment placed on it by Thor’s father, Odin. But in this matter we are not concerned with the fantasy of myths or comic books, but the real world of Hollywood movies.
In the 2011 film
Thor, the Norse “gods” are identified as a race of alien beings, whose science is so advanced compared to twenty-first century Earth that their abilities appear not unlike magic to us (explicitly invoking Arthur C. Clarke’s
third law). In this case, we can speculate as to the properties that uru metal must have in order to account for the experimental evidence in the Thor and Avengers films.
In the first Thor film, when Odin prepares to banish his wayward son to Earth, he whispers to the hammer: “whoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.” In these days of interactive, voice recognition software in smartphones, such reprogramming of the hammer’s operating system through speech commands hardly counts as ‘magic.’ But how the nanotech embedded within the hammer executes Odin’s instructions does defy present-day science.
In the
Avengers: Age of Ultron clip, Tony Stark speculates that there is a biosensor in the hammer’s shaft that recognizes when Thor has grasped Mjolnir. He is correct, in a sense—though it is not Thor’s fingerprints that the hammer is reading. Most likely it is taking some complex biological and psychological profile that calculates the “worthiness” of whoever is trying to lift the hammer. This is consistent with the scene in the clip where Steve Rogers (Captain America) is able to move the hammer (albeit slightly), while Tony Stark and Jim Rhodes, using thruster-assisted Iron Man and Iron Patriot gloves, are unable to budge Mjolnir at all. But if someone the hammer’s nanotechnology has determined to be “unworthy” tries to raise Mjolnir, how does it prevent itself from being moved?...."
Read more at
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/can-hul...-thors-hammer/
