Miraculous Ladybug STEM, Stat., and Info.

HOW STRONG IS THE MIME?

MLSCIENCE IS BACK, WITH MORE CALCULATIONS AND LOTS MORE EIFFEL TOWERS.

This post has been in the works for around half a year now, with the first concept being produced way back when the episode “The Mime” first aired in South Korea. Since then, hiatuses and personal stuff prevented mlscience staff and contributors from focusing solely on this project (and a couple others), but it’s finally here.

Today we focus on the important question: How strong is the Mime?

To do this, we calculated approximately how much of the Eiffel Tower he cut off, and therefore how much of the Eiffel Tower he carried in those few seconds of the most epic scene in the first season of Miraculous Ladybug.

And to do that, we needed some statistics of the weights of each part of the Eiffel tower. It was a long search, but eventually, we found the best possible reference: this online copy of “La tour de trois cents mètres”, written by Gustave Eiffel himself, published in the year 1900, and filled with technical and scientific observations about the tower and the external forces that affected its design and engineering.

And then we had to recreate the slice of the Eiffel tower and calculate how much of each part remained on the tower, and how much was sliced off. For that, we created this spreadsheet (please click it), and our calculations can be summed up from there and this image:

As you can see, given the difficulty of calculating based on every single piece of the Eiffel tower (we were gonna do that but we couldn’t find a source for the weights of every single piece), we simply made educated guesses based on what’s visible, counting the pixels of the areas that remained and those that were sliced off, and moving along from there. (Do note that while there are differences between the ML universe Eiffel Tower and our actual Eiffel Tower, we used the dimensions and specifications of the real Eiffel Tower, for the sake of simplicity.)

Now, these are extremely rough estimates (so give or take up to 250,000kg), and they’re nowhere near exact, but these numbers give us an idea of how much the Mime can carry with his akuma powers:

The part of the Eiffel Tower that remained after the slice weighed around 4,838,619 - 5,011,352 kg (10,667,329 - 11,048,140 lbs).

The part of the Eiffel Tower that was sliced off (and, therefore, held up by the Mime) weighed around 4,688,138 - 4,860,871 kg (10,335,575 - 10,716,387 lbs!).

The angle of the slice relative to the ground is about 38 degrees.

That means the Mime carried close to 5,000 Tonnes of Eiffel Tower. STRONG.

Now, the reason that these numbers are so wide in range is because Eiffel himself put two different tables in his book (he claims within the book that it “wouldn’t make a difference” because it was only due to the inconsistencies brought by the revolutionary elevators), and so we had to calculate using both sets of information. In fact, the second set of info was off by 400 kg, and we had to provide yet another set of information. (All of which are seen in the spreadsheet.) Surprisingly, the part that was cut-off and the part that remained both were really close to each other in terms of mass; almost equally splitting the Eiffel Tower’s almost 10,000 tonnes to two parts of around 5,000 tonnes each.

So there’s our answer. The Mime can carry at least 5,000 tonnes, or around 5,000,000 kg, or roughly 11,000,000 lbs. That’s pretty strong.

And once again, the Eiffel Tower has helped @mlscience produce answers to these all-important questions. We love you, Eiffel tower.

To finish off this post, here’s actual footage of mlscience staff celebrating the irreplaceable landmark that towers over the city that we all know and love.

Special thanks to:

@wikkedwolff for helping translate some parts of the book from French; and @slibinass for being the goddess of productivity that pushed us to make this happen.

We here at mlscience will be back with more content soon!