Top 10 Most Physics-Breaking Pokémon

Pokémon is, essentially, scifi. Even though the world of Pokémon is teeming with what appears to be magical creatures with supernatural powers, it’s almost always explained by science. Pokéballs, computer boxes, Pokédexes, and so on are all scifi technology that shows us how much more advanced this world really is in terms of science. And, looking at most Pokémon, even the otherwise magical stuff makes a lot of sense. There’s electricity-generating rodents, self-illuminating fish, fast-flying birds, fire-breathing dogs… All a bit of a stretch, but none of them entirely unbelievable. Pokédex entries especially help us understand the scientific basis behind a Pokémon.

Well, most of the time anyway.

Some Pokédex entries… Well, they bring up more questions than they answer, and end up breaking physics more than explaining anything. Where some Pokémon are plausible, or even sound like they might exist in the real world, some of them beat science up until it crawls whimpering into a corner to cry.

Here are the ten worst offenders in that category.

Goomy is one of our newer acquaintances, an adorable little slug-dragon. It’s a tiny little thing, intentionally quite weak, and is described as hiding in damp, shady places to keep itself safe and slimy. And then you have this Pokédex entry:

“It’s covered in a slimy membrane that makes any punches or kicks slide off it harmlessly.” (Y)

Slime is a pretty good way to protect yourself, but not quite like this. There’s always going to be angle from which the punch or kick can’t be deflected, because it hits the surface directly. For all of them to be genuinely harmless, the creature would have to be so soft and malleable that punching it would just cause it to change shape because of the impact. There’s no mention of anything like that. Just the slimy membrane.

And, the game agrees. Punches and kicks do the normal amount of damage to this little guy. The damage isn’t even cut down by a resistance, nor does Goomy have any ability to back this claim up. What gives, Pokédex?

Doduo is the two-headed Pokémon world equivalent of ostriches or emus. It has massive feet, a long neck for balance, incredible running speeds, and negligible wings. I mean, look at it. If it has wings, they are hardly of any particularly useful variety. If you don’t believe me, take it from these Pokédex entries for Doduo:

“Its short wings make flying difficult. Instead, this Pokémon runs at high speed on developed legs.” (Yellow)

“A bird that makes up for its poor flying with its fast foot speed. Leaves giant footprints.” (R/B)

So, basically, the whole deal with this Pokémon is that it’s crap at flying, but that’s okay because it runs really fast.

Yet it learns Fly.

All of its other flying moves, out of the total of eight Flying-type moves it can learn, are along the lines of Peck or Pluck, but then it can somehow learn Fly – and, later on, Aerial Ace, replacing the mystery of “Doduo learns Sky Attack” that appeared in Gen I and never again after that. How? Its wings are so short it can’t even escape enemies with them, yet it has no difficulty chauffeuring you all over the world by air.

Doduo, you get a C for confusing.

Garchomp looks like the kind of Pokémon you wouldn’t want to piss off. It’s strong, has a mean expression, and carries triangular blades attached-

“When it folds up its body and extends its wings, it looks like a jet plane. It flies at sonic speed.” (D)

“It flies at speeds equal to a jet fighter plane. It never allows its prey to escape.” (P)

Wait, wings? I’m not an expert on aerodynamics, but I get the feeling the appendages Garchomp do not function quite like what you would call a “wing”. But, then, drawings can be deceiving. Maybe they function just like the delta wings on a fighter plane, like the Pokédex entries state, despite appearing much too small and not really the right shape for it. So, I guess what we have here is the fighter jet version of your standard wyvern, then?

Except it does not learn Fly. Garchomp is a flying dragon, stated to fly at supersonic speeds, no less, that can’t do even as much as a basically flightless bird can. It also learns no Flying-type moves whatsoever, with one notable exception: Aerial Ace.

Go figure.

Blaziken is another fellow to be taken seriously. It punches, it kicks, it scorches you. Nothing odd there – at least as far as the Pokémon universe is concerned. Blaziken is a strong contender, no doubt. But just how strong are we talking here?

“Blaziken has incredibly strong legs – it can easily clear a 30-story building in one leap. This Pokémon’s blazing punches leave its foes scorched and blackened.” (S)

So, uhh. It can jump over a 30-story building? That’s a pretty vague statement, considering this building could be anything from super narrow to really wide. But, if we’re to make the math a bit easier here and just see how difficult it would be to get on top of a 30-story building, that’s still at least a good 300 ft, or 100 m, to jump right there. Considering Blaziken’s weight, a jump that height would take at the very least approximately 52,000 Joules of energy. Just for reference, it would have to eat 26 Quarter Pounders just to recoup the energy lost in that single jump. That’s about 13,000 calories.

So, either that’s a once-in-a-lifetime jump for a Blaziken, or then Pokémon food has a lot of calories in it. Alternatively, Blaziken comes with built-in rocket engines as standard issue.

Pidgeot is one of the original birds, and as such, it’s still pretty popular as the standard team flying-type. We all know it as a fast flyer, and most of us have probably had one carry us all over the world at one point or another in our games. But did you know just how fast a Pidgeot is, exactly?

“This Pokémon flies at Mach 2 speed, seeking prey. Its large talons are feared as wicked weapons.” (Yellow)

Mach 2 is a speed most probably recognize as approximately “really fast”, or somewhere in the neighbourhood of that. But, to be quite precise, Mach 2 is 1522 mph, or 2450 km/h. That means you can go around the world once in about 16-17 hours. Yeah, it’s that fast. But there’s other consequences of that kind of speed besides just impressiveness.

Depending on your age, you may or may not recall a kind of plane called the Concorde. It was a supersonic passenger airliner, one of the only two to ever be commercially used, that regularly flew at around Mach 2. This limit did not come from the capabilities of the engines – those could have gone much faster – but instead from the fact that going any faster would have heated the plane over the 261 F (127 C) its aluminium body could handle. Notably, a Concorde looks like this:

which is significantly more aerodynamic than a Pidgeot, and much more made of aluminium and other heat-resistant materials, too.
Conclusion: a bird flying at Mach 2 would, instead of spotting some tasty prey, burst into flame. Pidgeot, I assume, is no exception.

Machamp is the epitome of evolution when it comes to punching. Since its last form, Machoke, it has actually sprouted a new pair of arms, presumably simply to punch more effectively. And boy, is it effective.

“It punches with its four arms at blinding speed. It can launch 1,000 punches in two seconds.” (D)

Wow. So, first of all, it can punch 500 times in a second, meaning that each arm is punching 125 per second. That’s so fast that the vibration would actually make a sound (or, more specifically, this sound)! His arms would also have to all move at about 341 mph (549 km/h) to accomplish that sort of speed. Needless to say, that’s going into exponential amounts of energy from the Blaziken example. Where Blaziken had to eat 26 Quarter Pounders’ worth of energy, Machamp would have to do something more akin to 1860 of them after a second of that punching flurry. To put that into some kind of perspective, even an average nuclear power plant takes more than two seconds to produce the kind of energy these punches consume in a single second. And here we’re told that he can keep it up for at least two seconds.

That, my friends, is some serious punching.

Grimer is the quintessential Poison-type, complete with a purple coloring, sludgey consistency, and an alleged stench. It even has the ability Stench, which makes wild Pokémon appear less often, as well as making its opponents flinch when attacked every now and then. That’s some vile stuff right there. So how did a Pokémon like this come to be?

“It was born when sludge in a dirty stream was exposed to the moon’s X-rays. It appears among filth.” (DPPt, B&W)

I, um, uh. What?

Okay. Let’s take a step back here. Now, it is true that the Moon does emit some X-rays, much like every other celestial body. And, yes, X-rays are generally a high-energy radiation, able to heat up things and potentially mutate some molecules. However, the Moon is the weakest known source of X-ray radiation outside of planet Earth – we get about 0.00012 Joules worth of energy per second from the Moon’s X-rays. Even if we put aside the fact that sunlight pelts us with millions of times more energy than that every day, there are plenty of other things that are more effective than the moon’s X-rays. For example: a flashlight. Or, y’know, Pokémon. It would be more plausible to create a new Pokémon by having your Machamp pelt at some sludge with its fist than it would be for the moon’s X-rays to have that effect.

But, okay, this is a universe in which radiation from Moon Stones make a whole bunch of weird critters evolve into new forms instantly. So maybe their moon is a lot crazier? Well, Grimer’s crimes against science don’t end there.

“Wherever Grimer has passed, so many germs are left behind that no plants will ever grow again.” (S, SS)

So many ge- What? That doesn’t make any sense! Bacteria growing in the ground is generally what makes plants thrive! So, somehow Grimer is comprised solely of harmful, pathogenic or parasitic ‘germs’? That would be all fine and dandy, except for the fact that with a handful of exceptions, anything that can be titled a germ is still alive. If there’s nothing there in that ground to eat, like, say, some plant life or something, they’re all going to die away, and then the plants can come back. So, for them to stay there for forever, never again allowing a plant cover to grow on that piece of ground… That’s some serious germs right there.

I think science died a little the day Grimer was born.

No matter what Machamp can do, Gardevoir blows it straight out of the water. Wait, what? This dainty-looking, fluttery creature? Yup! While it may not come from its arms, Gardevoir still packs a nasty punch.

“To protect its Trainer, it will expend all its psychic power to create a small black hole.” (Pt, B/W, B2W2, and X)

With the previous examples, I’ve been able to reduce the amounts of energy needed for each feat into numbers of burgers, or seconds of nuclear power. That doesn’t work here. The amount of energy needed to create a black hole does not precisely exist on Earth – or, at least we have no access to such energy yet. In order to create just a teeny tiny little black hole, smaller than an atom, we would need 1015 times more energy than the most powerful collider, the Large Hadron Collider can currently put out. It has also been speculated that the collider that creates such a black hole would have to be over a light year in diameter for the particles to reach the required speed before colliding.

And this is completely ignoring the fact that creating such a black hole would not be very healthy for the trainer at all. Even if it was one of those teeny tiny black holes that only exist for a couple of seconds before radiating themselves out of existence, black holes emit so much gamma radiation that the trainer would either be vaporized on the spot, or die of radiation poisoning within days – as would everyone else in the vicinity.

Screw Arceus, Gardevoir is officially the strongest Pokémon. Well, except it doesn’t survive the black hole it just created. But still. Who’s dainty-looking now?

Magcargo is a snail made of lava, so it can be presumed it’s pretty hot. After all, lava is really hot, is it not? It’s molten stone, for crying out loud! And, indeed, Magcargo is fairly high on the list of hot stuff.

“Magcargo’s body temperature is approximately 18,000 degrees F (10,000 °C). Water is vaporized on contact. If this Pokémon is caught in the rain, the raindrops instantly turn into steam, cloaking the area in a thick fog.” (S)

That’s hot alright! And you may not think much of it – beyond the initial “wow, that’s a lot of degrees” – until you start looking at the temperatures of some other things. Like, say, magma, which ranges from 1300 °F to 2400 °F (700 °C to 1300 °C), sometimes getting as high as 2900 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1600 °C. You may notice that this is less than a tenth of a Magcargo’s temperature.

Ow.

Not even the surface of the Sun – generally known as a Really Dang Hot Thing – is as hot as Magcargo is. In fact, the Sun’s surface temperature caps at about 9900 degrees F, or 5505 °C, which is just a bit over half of Magcargo’s surface temperature. Nuclear bombs, the heat blast of which can vary from slightly hotter to significantly hotter than the Sun, mostly don’t compare to Magcargo’s temperature. That’s how hot it is.

Forget raindrops instantly turning into steam, this Pokémon would turn its entire surroundings into steam – including its trainer.

Wailord is the longest Pokémon by a huge margin, and you could be cheated into thinking it’s also the heaviest. But, no, Wailord is, as of Gen VI, only the 11th most heavy Pokémon. Still, that’s pretty heavy, right? After all, it’s based on a friggin’ blue whale, the biggest animal on Earth.

Alas, Wailord’s length and weight don’t really add up that way – at all.

I’m going to have to do some math here, so bear with me a little. A Wailord is 14.5 m (47’07”) long, and we can – conservatively – approximate its cross-cut diameter around maybe 6 meters (19 feet). Calculating its volume roughly as a cylinder gives us the volume of 410 cubic meters. With Wailord’s weight of 398.0 kg (877.4 lbs.), this gives us a rough density of 0.97 kg/m^3. This is significantly lighter than water, which has the density of around 999 kg per cubic meter depending on the temperature, meaning that our aquatic whale Pokémon can’t actually dive or otherwise really hang out underwater. But that’s not all! It’s also much less dense than air, which, even at its lightest, has the density of about 1.2 kg per cubic meter.

To spell that out for you, Wailord is lighter than air and therefore floats. It might be one of the heaviest Pokémon around, but it would still be more plausible as a blimp than an actual whale.

So, how come Wailord doesn’t learn Fly?

Written by An-chan.
Edits and suggestions by Bay Alexison, bobandbill, Hoenn, Richard Fightmaster and Slayr231.