Yeah, in the comics verse Stark is one of the ten or so smartest people who ever lived.
Stark, Richards, Von Doom, Pym and a few others. It’s scary, really.
In the MCU Stark might be tops. In addition to the engineering stuff he also has breakthroughs in particle physics with the Arc Reactor.
“Tony Stark did this in a MONTH in a CAVE!!!”
“Sir, I’m not Tony Stark.”
MCU Pym has the shrinking breakthrough and the talking-to-bugs breakthrough, and IIRC he relied on something else entirely to get crazy rich as a CEO on his own.
Speaking of which: folks keep going on and on about Tony, but didn’t he have the huge head start of following in Howard Stark’s footsteps? Tony doesn’t need to invent the stuff his dad used to make flying cars in the '40s and et cetera; he just needs to spend a lot of time looking into his father’s research.
(My points of view here are based on a much better knowledge of the earlier days of Marvel, so may not reflect current state of that universe).
It’s hard to get a read on Tony Stark, he’s not the nerdy egghead type like the others, more in common with Von Doom than the rest. He’s also more of an engineer than a scientist. This would be the reality of the modern world if such people existed, Richards and Pym would be toiling away in labs developing new technology and principles that Stark would be exploiting for his business.
Nah. He’d enjoy the lack of competition for the chicks.
What, both of them?
Hey, Boston’s filled with available young ladies looking for the hot, rich smart guy at MIT. Don’t put down the townies, man.
In one story featuring the Illuminati, Stark (after everyone but him was introduced as “Doctor”) mentioned that he holds three doctorates. I would guess they involved Physics, Engineering and Business Administration, but I’m only guessing.
And yet, we get at least one of these threads per year since the original film, often with people protesting that it should be possible to build the Iron Man suit complete with powered flight and virtually indestructible exoskeleton.
As a rough approximation the Iron Man suit can be considered as a combination of a highly articulated flying humanoid robot, a fully autonomous drone, a directed energy weapon platform, and a super compact flying car. Since none of these are practical realities despite decades of effort, it stands to reason that the Iron Man suit is equally impractical notwithstanding that it is propelled by technomagical “proprietary thruster technology” and powered by a miniaturized “ARC fusion reactor” which appears to be some kind of hybrid cold fusion-tokamak reactor that fits in a canister the size of a can of tuna and emits no ionizing or neutron radiation whatsoever and remains cool enough to be held in an unprotected hand while in operation.
Mechanical and electrical engineering are two overall areas of educational studies but within those areas are many different and somewhat overlapping disciplines. (Historical note: electrical engineering actually emerged out of the existing field of mechanical engineering because the original applications for electric technology were primarily used to drive pumps or other rotation-to-translation mechanisms; the emphasis on logic circuits and signals processing that has become computing only emerged much later.) There is no single field or course of study that would prepare a student to construct flying powered armor notwithstanding the difficulties involved.
The different disciplines to construct something like the Iron Man suits would comprise the following:
[ul]
[li]Structures: The required strength and stiffness of the mechanial structure of the suit[/li][li]Mechanism design: Design of the vast array of individual mechanisms that permit the suit to articulate, actuate aerosurfaces, deploy weapons, allow the user to enter and egress, et cetera[/li][li]Thermal control systems: The ability to manage the temperature of internal systems and expel excess heat generated by the propulsion and power systems to keep them operating within qualified margins [/li][li]Structural and aeroelastic dynamics: The modal and coupled loads behavior of the suit under thrust and external loads[/li][li]Aerothermal: The external heating of the suit due to aerodynamic interactions from the subsonic to supersonic range[/li][li]Aerodynamics: The external loading and aerodynamic behavior of the suit in the nearly infinite combination of flying configurations[/li][li]Plasma dynamics and high energy physics: the ability to control the high temperature plasma generated by the repulsers and chest plate[/li][li]Propulsion: The systems that provide powered flight and propellant management (for the Iron Man suit this is done with the “proprietary repulser technology” which apparently requires no propellant or external working fluid and generates negligible waste heat)[/li][li]Power distribution systems: The ability to control and route the required power to the vast array of individual sensors, actuators, flight controls, thrusters, et cetera[/li][li]Guidance, navigation, and control: The ability to provide real-time automatic response to allow the suit to identify its position, orientation, and configuration so as to fly in a controlled manner[/li][li]Embedded systems & avionics: The individual electronic/software systems which actuate and provide feedback from individual mechanisms[/li][li]Communications and telemetry: All of the various systems which allow the user to communicate with ground stations or other suits including data channels, audio and visual signals, et cetera[/li][li]Flight/control software: The massive software system that would be required to be able to command and control a vehicle of this complexity and variable configuration; in the case of the Iron Man suits, it appears to be controlled by a machine intelligence system which accepts commands in natural language that is generations beyond the capability of the most advanced systems in existence[/li][li]Human-machine interfaces and controls: The vast array of control and feedback systems that the user would need in order to use the system with sufficient filtering and regulation to avoid exceeding viable operator workload[/li][li]Environmental control systems: the systems necessary to keep the operator at safe temperatures and experienced acceleration loads; provide conditioned air, nutrition, and waste removal; protect against external thermal conditions; et cetera[/li][li]Systems engineering: The required requirements analysis, test planning analysis, interface definition, verification methods/protocols, and configuration management to assure that all of the individual subsystems function as expected and don’t experience detrimental or unexpected interactions with one another[/li][li]System test and integration: The ground support equipment and processes to integrate and test the individual subsystems and overall functional integrity of the vehicle in the envelope of all differing flight and operating regimes[/li][/ul]
I’m reasonably conversant in a few of these categories, and I’ve known a handful of people who could legitimately claim to be an expert in two or perhaps three, but there is no practical way that one individual could have the vast array of expertise to develop all of it, nor the time to develop all of these systems to the apparent level of technical maturity they demonstrate. The complexity of the software system alone would represent several hundred person-years of effort to develop even assuming that kind of strong artificial general intelligence were possible with existing computing systems. The Iron Man suit is really no more practically achievable than the Ant-Man technology or the Hulk transformation; it just seems more technically grounded because Tony Stark doesn’t change size or inertial properties.
I got some good laughs out of the original Iron Man film when Stark is designing and testing the Mark II suit and the flight controls (“Yeah, I can fly…”) but really, the several near death accidents and failures he experiences highlight the necessity of doing thorough subsystem and system testing before actual flight testing. Had Stark killed himself (and possibly others) in his original flight test there would be no Iron Man, and as a result we’d have cybernetically augmented rampaging CEOs and flame-breathing angry ex-veterans running amok. Of course, we also wouldn’t have had an essentially indestructible apocalyptic kill-bot dropping an entire city from high altitude in an effort to wipe out humanity, so on the whole, it would probably be a wash, but still, it makes sense to do some serious testing before hopping in the suit and overflying Santa Monica and then trying to beat the powered flight altitude record.
Stranger
But, again, Howard Stark had already built a metal-plated flying car before Tony was born; Tony doesn’t need to invent a flying car, he just needs to improve one. And that was before Howard acquired and experimented with and made strides toward making a cheap knockoff of the weird glowy cube that powered the Red Skull’s weapons.
So, yeah, Tony still accomplishes a comic-book implausible amount of stuff – but he did it by studying his father’s notes, and watching an old film of his dad gesturing at the atomic-structure model of the necessary substance, and inheriting the corporation that already had Howard Stark’s patentable arc reactor up and running.
To be fair, if I gave you a month and a million dollars, you could get yourself a really crappy Iron Man suit; and if I gave you a year and ten million dollars, you could get a somewhat-less-crappy Iron Man suit; and if I gave you a decade and a hundred million dollars, you couldn’t get a ridiculously crappy Ant-Man suit.
Only a million dollars to get a crappy suit? What, are you Dr Evil, frozen in time since the 60s? 
I bet the movie “hero” suit costs more than that, and it can’t actually do anything!
A mere million won’t even pay for a feasibility study if you sent it to an aerospace contractor (you know, someone with even close to the technical knowledge to attempt such a task). Almost every one of the 17 individual aspects of the suit (as outlined by SoaT) is beyond current capabilities, let alone integration of all of them together.
And he didn’t even cover the fact that no person can survive any kind of impact as seen in the movies while wearing the suit. The suit may be impervious, but Stark would be jelly, or at least brain damaged, from any one of the hits the suit has taken.
Even apart from the existence of explicit magic, the laws of physics are clearly different in the Marvel Universe. Exhibit A is the Hulk.
I always assumed that long before the cave and the box of scrapes, Stark had invented inertial dampeners, tractor beams, and force fields. Being a warmonger he had applied those mostly to repulsors, which along with the arc reactor is the basic technology behind all the wonders the armor accomplishes.
Well, I was starting with the idea of the one he built In A Cave With A Box Of Scraps: just armor plate and flamethrowers and a motor in the back? Could you afford that, and still have enough money left over for, like, a Bell Rocket Belt?
I cut the movies a lot of slack, mostly because they’re well made and fun, but Stark couldn’t even have survived the first crash in the first movie.
If repulsor tech works in such a way that it is used to protect Stark from g-forces, then it has many other uses. Every commercial airplane and car should be equipped with a field to protect everyone in the event of a crash. It would be criminal to withhold the tech, even. Death in crashes could be 100% eliminated.
Oh, no doubt. But my point is, we could build a crappy Iron Man costume: bullets would ping off it, you could shoot targets with the weaponry built into it, you could even get some kind of motorized effects working in it. It’d be clunky, but we could spend a lot of time and money building it into something slightly less clunky. And if we put the finest engineers on the project, and money were no object – sure, you still wouldn’t have the Iron Man suit; and, sure, you still wouldn’t even be close; but you’d be missing it closer.
Whereas, if you asked me to build something that shrinks you down to the size of an ant and back and forth at will, I’d say no, and if you said but how much closer can you miss it if I give you a lot of time and money and experts, I’d say no, see, I’m at zero, and with time and money and experts I’d still be at zero.
In the films, both Stark and Rhodes wear MIT rings.
The repulsors are magic, and the arc reactor is magic. They just can’t be done, using any known physics. Therefore, if anyone asks me about a “real-world Iron Man suit”, I start by assuming that those are off the table. So what do we have left? We have a nonflying powered exoskeletal suit, with armor plating, and some built-in weapons. Now, we can’t do even that as well as it was done in the movies, but we can do that in a crude, clunky way. It’ll be a lot bulkier than Stark’s suit, to leave room for the motors and actuators. The AI, if any, would be much cruder (mostly, you’d just have control circuits running from pressure-plates detecting the user’s movements to the motors). Without the miracle power supply, you’d either need a tether, or be restricted to a very short battery life. Repulsor weapons are out, but you could still build in some gunpowder weapons, and so on.
And the construction of such a suit would require mechanical and electrical engineering, hence my answer to the OP.
As an aside, I don’t think JARVIS is actually all that advanced an AI. Yes, it looks impressive, but the only people we ever see conversing with it are Stark and (to a lesser extent) Potts. It looks to us like it’s communicating via natural language, but it’s just as possible that it’s simply responding to set exact keywords like any computer system, and that Stark (who programmed it) chose keywords that sound like natural language. Meanwhile, since he knows all of the keywords, he knows how to phrase things so that JARVIS will understand them. Most likely the truth is somewhere in between, and JARVIS is like a specialized version of Siri, with some limited ability to parse language. The wrong questions would still trip it up, but Stark knows that, and therefore doesn’t ask any questions beyond JARVIS’ known capabilities.
He’s an off-the-charts supergenius and can invent virtually anything.
Fuel was always my concern for the Iron Man armor. Where’s he got the fuel hidden to be able to fly so far and so fast? And the most recent Iron Man movie, where each individual part of the suit had its own little thruster, fuel supply and guidance system, was just ludicrous.
But whatever. It’s a superhero movie, not a technical treatise.
Also known as a “Brass Rat”. As it happens, I’ve known and/or worked with a number of MIT grads. They were all bright people, certainly, and generally speaking good engineers/physicsts/chemists, but none of them were off-the-charts brilliant; that’s reserved for Caltech students. I kid, I kid. Actually, the smartest, most broadly knowledgeable, knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark brilliant person I’ve known professionally was a Harvey Mudd and Cornell graduate, as much as it pains me to admit that.
Tony Stark lives in a universe where Norse gods destroy small New Mexico towns and Oxford colleges, a radiation accident turns a physicist into a giant green rage monster, Paul Rudd can shrink to the size of an insect but still be unnervingly charming, and the dopey guy from Parks and Rec is actually a galaxy-wide lothario who defeats the big bad in a dance-off. Jeremy Renner is running around with a bow and arrow, none of this makes any sense. My question is how Captain America can destroy an elevator full of S.T.R.I.K.E. team thugs and then leap twenty-odd stories to the warm comfort of a concrete pad, but has trouble defeating one French Algerian mercenary in hand to hand combat? Never mind the guy’s Muay Thai skills; can’t Cap just chest punch Batroc’s heart through his back and move on to completing the mission? It isn’t like he didn’t just take out (i.e. kill or permanently maim) an even dozen mercs who were supposed to be holding the ship.
Stranger
It’s a comic book, so by comic rules, Tony Stark only has one degree, in “Science.”
“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?”
“Last night.”