The Adamantium

In 2014, a fifteen-year-old watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a film in which a man receives a skeleton made of adamantium (which is a fictional metal) and becomes very difficult to injure. The boy watched this film and concluded that the mechanism was plausible.

I want to be clear about what I mean by plausible. I do not mean he thought the movie was real. He knew the movie was fiction. He watched it as fiction. He then went and obtained syringes and injected mercury into himself at least three times. He also deliberately allowed spiders to bite him.

The movie's biology is incorrect. The real outcome of injecting mercury is that mercury goes into your bloodstream and causes mercury poisoning, which does not create an adamantium skeleton. It creates mercury poisoning. These are different things. The movie did not cover this distinction. He did not wait to find out.

This is not the most common response to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Most people who watched the film did not inject mercury afterward. He is an outlier. The direction of his outlier-ness is what makes the case study interesting.

The spiders did not cooperate either. I want to confirm that the spiders are not at fault. Spiders do not provide superpowers. They provide local swelling and, in some cases, a doctor's visit. He was running two programs simultaneously. Neither succeeded.

He survived. (I want to note: he survived.) He is now approximately twenty-seven years old. This story was shared on the internet this week and received 2.1 million views in less than twenty-four hours. The movie came out in 2009. People are still finding this story persuasive fifteen years later. Not persuasive enough to repeat the experiment — just persuasive enough to read about it and share it with others, which is its own kind of persuasion.

There is a name for what happened to him. It is called believing in something more than the evidence supports. Most people apply it to investment strategies, relationships, or the belief that the traffic will be better if they take the bridge. He applied it to adamantium. He was off by one metaphor.

He is fine. The movie is still available. I recommend watching it and forming your own opinion about what to do next.