When Alice from Alice in Wonderland consumes a mysterious bottle labeled “drink me,” she quickly shrinks to the floor. The Magic School Bus once got attacked by white blood cells when it shrunk down to explore a sick person’s bloodstream. And Ant-Man is famous for using his shrinking technology in Marvel films and comic books. But will humans ever be able to shrink down like this in real life?
Unfortunately, no. Physicists say that tech with the power to make someone bite-sized would break the laws of physics. (Sorry, Ant-Man.)
Still, scientists have fun pondering how a fictional shrinking machine might work. “It drives you to think about: What does determine the size of things?” says physicist James Kakalios. Finding the answer can involve looking into the hearts of atoms and the power of the sun.
Smushing atoms together
One hypothetical way to shrink something would be to reduce the size of its atoms. Atoms are the building blocks of almost all matter in the universe. Each atom is made up of electrons that surround an atomic nucleus.
An atom’s size depends on several fundamental constants, including the charge of an electron. Those constants don’t change. Tweaking them would require breaking the laws of physics, says Kakalios. He works at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and wrote the book The Physics of Superheroes.
If shrinking atoms wouldn’t work, what about shortening the space between them?
Atoms come together to build all kinds of molecules. In the first Ant-Man movie, Dr. Hank Pym explains that he made his famous Pym Particles by learning how to reduce the distance between molecules. This, he claims, is what gives Ant-Man’s suit the power to contract down to the size of an ant — or even smaller.
Atoms and molecules in the human body, though, are already packed closely together. Trying to get them even closer would be challenging.
You could try to force the atoms together. But Kakalios says that even a tiny reduction in size would require immense amounts of pressure. That would be bad news for any person who tried it on themselves. “The technical term is ‘gross,’” Kakalios says. “It would just smush you, and you don’t want to do that.”
Explosions and black holes
Atoms do get pushed together in our solar system, notes Salvatore Rappoccio. He’s a physicist at the University at Buffalo in New York. To see this in action, just look to our sun. Like all stars, it is powered by fusion. That’s when atomic nuclei are brought together under immense pressure until they form a new atom.
Fusion releases enough energy to make our sun shine. Scientists are trying to re-create this process on Earth to generate power. But it wouldn’t be very useful for shrinking technology. “You would explode,” Rappoccio says.
Venturing farther into the universe offers extreme examples of what happens when matter is packed very closely together. Black holes form when mass gets packed into a smaller and smaller space until eventually it becomes so dense that nothing — not even light — can escape the object’s gravity.
Black holes are typically born when massive stars explode and their cores collapse. A black hole has never been created on Earth. But Rappoccio says that in theory, any object could become a black hole — even a person — if it were compressed into a small enough space.
Even if you somehow became that dense, though, you’d perish long before you could tell the tale. Creating a shrink ray to squeeze other objects down to an extreme density could also be devastating. In Despicable Me, Gru tried to shrink the moon to steal it. “In real life, if you try to shrink the moon, it would become a black hole and destroy everything,” Rappoccio says.
Fantastical and real shrinking
Even if Alice, Ms. Frizzle or Ant-Man were somehow able to bypass the laws of physics to survive shrinkage, they would face other problems.
Shrinking a person’s vocal cords would give them a very high-pitched, and very quiet, voice. And if their mass stayed the same, they would be incredibly heavy for their size. Ant-Man would crush any ant he tried to ride! Puny people might not even be able to see very well. As their eyes shrunk, their ability to process visible wavelengths of light might become worse.
“None of this is possible,” Kakalios says. But it’s well worth thinking about. “It’s given me an excuse to talk about real physics that you haven’t noticed. By talking about this superhero ice cream sundae, I sneakily got you to eat your spinach.”
Kakalios also notes that the science of making things smaller is not entirely imaginary. Although tech may not be able to shrink people, humans are remarkably adept at shrinking our tech. Without the real-life science of making smaller materials, you wouldn’t be able to read this sentence.
Transistors are devices that act as building blocks for your computer, phone and other devices. They allow computers to process information using the numbers “0” and “1.” Electronic machines need a lot of them to work.
There can be billions of transistors in your phone and in your computer. Each one used to be the size of a person’s fingernail, Kakalios notes. Now, they can be engineered to be even smaller than viruses.
This feat of downsizing has given us world-changing modern technologies. And it’s all thanks to the same physics that prevents shrinking technology for people from existing. “The world is a knowable place,” Kakalios says. “By figuring out the rules by how the world works, we can then use these rules to make our lives better.”
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