The Science of 'Ant-Man'

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of weeks. So, uh, we won't be on We're currently recording this right before Christmas, so it's gonna be a little bit uh off schedule. But once we get past the new year, I think we'll we'll get back onto that Friday schedule. All right, well, let's launch into it. We're talking about aunt Man. We're talking about aunts, We're

talking about the possible science of miniaturization. Uh. Aunt Man, of course, is the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to come out came out here in as of this recording. It has just hit the digital streaming market and I believe it's it's either out on DVD and Blu Ray now or it will be very soon. I believe you saw in the theater. I did. I saw it in the theater. I'm, as many of our listeners know, a huge comic book fan and try to support comic book movies.

For the most part. I was a little bit on the fence about this one, to be honest, but I did go see it in the theater. Col I liked it. Okay, it wasn't like my favorite or anything, but but the science was particularly interesting. Yeah, the science was. I just saw it last week and I really enjoyed it. I was.

I definitely came into it not you know, I wasn't certain what to expect because on one hand, I don't have any real attachment to Aunt Man and I, even though I love miniaturization science fiction as well discussed um, Yeah, I was kind of like, well, not enough that he's little one, does you have to talk to aunts too? And then I also had been following some of the production history with that being part of it and not being a part of it. That was part of my hesitant. Yeah.

The reason why I was hesitant to see it was I'm a big egg right fan, and I had followed you know, we don't need to go into all that here, but I kind of followed the troubled production of this movie and was really looking forward to his take on the character. Um, but I think that there's some glimmers of his voice in that movie still, I think so. Yeah. And and Joe Cornish to the guy who did attack the Block, also helped work on this, right, Yeah, I thought.

I thought the end result was a heck of a lot of fun. I enjoy it, And after I saw it, I said, hey, let's uh flu this. Let's let's do an episode that I was a big nerd. So so here's the thing, like, for this episode, I'm gonna try to restrain my comic nerd. Um. I am gonna probably cover the segment on just sort of how comic book aunt Man compares to to movie aunt Man, and I'll

probably interject here there. But Robert's gonna keep me on track, and we're in a drastic to the science of this, because there's some really fascinating stuff that you know, honestly, like approaching this, didn't think was gonna turn out to be true. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's it's it's kind of funny how much how much great science there is in

the film. Uh, So just just start off, let's talk a little bit about miniaturization science fiction itself, because this provides sort of the soil from which ant Man it initially emerges, and then the latest incarnation the film also, uh, comes out of this history. Yeah, there's a fascination I think that probably popped up in the late fifties and early sixties, which is when ant Man the comic was

created with the idea of shrinking and or growing things. Right, we were fascinated with giant ants and bugs and stuff being monsters in horror movies. And yeah, and I think a lot of this comes out of increased awareness of what's going on at the smaller levels of nature and uh, and also our ability to share that with the general population. People were able to see these close up photos and their and learning about our our continuing exploration of these

tiny realms. So one of the one of the big ones that we have to mention is, of course Richard Matheson's novel The Shrinking Man and the subsequent nine seven movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. And I've read I don't know how this matches up with the timeline. I've read that these were supposedly a big influence on on Hank Pim the Hand character about his first adventure in which he what he falls into an aunt hill. Yeah, that's the first, uh, the first comic that they did at

Marvel with him. And I don't even know if he was necessarily a superhero at that point. I think it was just kind of a you know, scientists, mad Science Gonna rise story. But yeah, man, Richard Matheson, Like when you go back and look at that guy's resume, he

influenced so much pop culture. Oh yeah, he did. And of course we have to mention the nineteen sixty six film Fantastic Voyage, in which a tiny submarine that contains a miniaturized Raquel Welch and a miniaturized Donald Pleasants and some other people that of varying importance, and they are you know, sent into the bloodstream, going in there to address an illness at a at a at a very

small scale. Yeah, there's there's there is a fascination like with this shrinking and growing thing, right, like the ones that I remember more often, the the growing ones, like Attack of the fifty Foot Woman. That's one, right, that was one of those big movies of the time, Amazing Colossal Man that was another giant them wash um. Now, of course, Fantastic Voyage itself kind of spins off into

its own little franchise. Isaac Asimov did the novelization in the nineteen sixty six and we'll discuss some of his science City and jacks into the franchise in a bit. He also did a Fantastic Voyage to Destination Brain in eighties seven. I read the former novel, but I remember trying to read the second one. I was like in junior high at the time, and I think I just kind of timed out on some of the science again

at the time. I should give it another read. Um. Kevin J. Anderson did Fantastic Voyage Microcosm much later, in which the crew explores the body of a dead alien. Wow. That sounds interesting, and I was. I was surprised to hear that in sixty eight there was a Fantastic Voyage animated series. I don't think I've ever seen a clip of this hadn't either. Yeah, that's in fact, like my knowledge of the whole Fantastic Voyage, you know, franchise is

rather limited. This sounds like a treasure trove of stuff to go back to. Yeah, and then of course Fantastic Voyage itself directly influenced the fabulous nine film Interspace, And this is the one I remember from growing up. I was ten when this came out and they hadn't I want to say it was like Universal Studios or something

like that. When I was a kid had an Inner Space ride and it was like one of those things where you you went into a room with like shaky seats and you basically watched a movie where like Martin Short or somebody walked you through as you went through the body. You know. Um, that was pretty cool. Yeah, it's a It was a great film I remember to watch as a kid because you had all the you know,

you had all this Martin Short manic stuff. Dennis Quaid was Dennis Quaid was was miniaturized in this cool little submarine in Martin Short. And then in the climax that I just I must have watched dozens of times as a kid. You had the bad guys miniaturized as well in his own little robot suit and they do battle in uh in the stomach. It's cool to aunt man in a way. Yeah, they didn't really go in anybody's body.

In aunt Man, for the most part, it's because he's ant sized and not like they're like microscopic, and yeah, they're much smaller, but but very similar, especially when you get into the battling chokh And then of course Fantastic Voyage and Inner Space went on to influence. Uh. There's a Futurama episode par Parasites Lost. Uh you remember this one. This is where Fry gets intestinal worms from eating a I think like a tuna fish sandwich that he buys

from a condom machine and galactic trucks. Always a bad idea, but that's that's a great miniaturization episode. There's a wonderful Rick and Morty episode titled Anatomy Park. Yeah. I can only imagine the mind of Dan Harmon at work on something like that. Sounds like a Jurassic Park. Honey, I shrunk the kids mash up. Yeah, yeah, but pretty much it's well, it's it's it's kind of a Fantastic Voyage

meets a neat Jurassic Parks. So we have all these deadly viruses that are kept in kind of a Jurassic Park inside the body of kind. I think it's an alcoholic, homeless Santa Claus, and then you get you get yourself miniaturized, and then you go and visit and you can meet all these terrible, you know, pathogens. Yeah, this sounds like Dan Harmon with an unlimited budget. So and then I just mentioned Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which is you know what, were there three of those movies or something

like that. I can't remember, but yeah, there was they shrunk the kid and then they blew up the baby something like that, and then I don't remember. I think there was a third bit. I never said. They were definitely again, like I want to say that those came out sometime in my three teen years or something like that, so I remember seeing them, but I don't remember a lot about them. It was that sort of arrow when like c G I was was just really starting to

become convincing. So the idea of Rick moranis getting shrunken down into his front yard and having to travel around with all the Yeah I believe aunts again answered like the go to for this miniaturization thing. Yeah, I mean, because, as we'll discuss in the second half of this episode, there are so fascinating and their world is is just so alien and an an intricate that we we can't help but imagine ourselves immersed in it. And then you know this, a lot of this spawned into and also

out of comic books. There is as much of a fascination with miniaturization and comics as there is in film and television from that time. So you've got aunt Man. Uh. D C has their version of aunt Man, which is the atom uh. And then uh, the ant Man has his wife, the Wasp. Uh well sometimes wife, sometimes not wife. I'll talk about that in a little bit. And uh,

there's there's all kinds of other series. In fact, there was even I think in the eighties there was a series called Micronots that was about like, uh like it was sort of like Star Wars meets ant Man, right, Like the idea was like they they lived in this tiny micro verse that was so small it was completely like it was sort of like the quantum realm from aunt Man. All right, well, tell me about aunt Man.

I'm coming at it as a guy who basically knows what I saw in the film and you know, skimming a few uh you know, comic wiki pages about him. Give me the full story. So ant Man is created in nineteen sixty two at Marvel Comics by the usual suspect Stanley and Jack Kirby, also with some help from Larry Lieber, who is Stanley's brother. Uh. And basically it's the character has usually been the version that Michael Douglas portrays in the movie right, the older heck Pim character,

except for he's not older in the in the original comics. UM. But the gist is he's a super scientist who fights crime. The way he does it is he has these PIM particles that he's invented that enable him to shunt his mass or gain mass from an alternate dimension. Uh, and he either shrinks or he gets big. And he used to like swallow capsules. I think when they first came out, Um, then he breathed in particle filled gas. I think that's why that the helmet. Then helmet sort of has like

a gas mask look to it. And then eventually, if I remember the cannon correctly, there's something about how his body absorbed the PIM particles, so he was basically just producing them on his own, and he could at will shrink or grow, and he could also like shrink or grow other objects nearby him. Or other people. Okay, so is it kind of like the whole Spider Man deal where at times Spider Man is shooting webs because he's made fantastic little devices. In other times it becomes more

a part of who he is physically. Uh No, I think it's like because those are two like this is super nerdy, but that the comic book version is the one with the web shooters. The movie version is the one where it shoots out organically. Okay, so he never shoots it out organically in the comics. They they reckcondit later on in like the two thousands for a series

called Ultimate Spider Man. But yes, so in this case, I think it was like sort of the same character in the same universe, but he just you know, over time, they're like capsules. That's kind of lame. Let's do gas, we don't. He doesn't need the gas. He can just change um. And so the deal was was he was

aunt Man. He joins the Avengers. He usually teams up with his girlfriends, sometimes wife Janet van Dyne, who is the Wasp, And in the movie they sort of hint at that and they show flashbacks to their crime fighting career together. The thing about Aunt Man of spoilers for aunt Man comics that are like, I guess, forty years old at this point. But uh, the thing about aunt Man that isn't really touched upon in the movies at all is that he has tons of different identities. So

aunt Man isn't just Hank Pim's identity. He also becomes Giant Man, where he just grows and smashes things. And then I guess he thought Giant Man wasn't a cool enough name, so he changes it to Goliath, and then he changes his name to Yellow Jacket and he starts shrinking again. Uh. And then there's even a point I think it was this was in the two thousands where the Wasp died or something, and to honor her memory,

he became the Wasp. So he was like the male version of the Wasp, al right, So if he recognized that you gotta keep mixing it up, you gotta keep reinventing yourself, so much so that like I believe it is part of the character's history that he had multiple personality disorder because like he was having a difficult time tracking all of his secret identities, and something to do with the particle ingestion was messing with his mind. So like when he the Yellow Jacket character, he's almost like

a different person um and and sort of a villain. Uh. And sometimes he gets brainwashed by villains. Other times he's

replaced by shape shifting aliens. So this character has this like really bizarre history of sometimes just being completely aloof to what's going on in the rest of the storylines around him, basically because he's not himself, to the point that there is a classic storyline in ant Man that I'm sure the film producers tried to stay away from as much as possible, in which aunt Man becomes very aggressive in his person persona as Yellow Jacket and has

a mental breakdown, and when the Wasp tries to intervene because they're married at this point, he hits her and is expelled from the Avengers. They end up getting a divorce, uh, and then I think, like, you know, maybe twenty or thirty years later in the comics they resumed their romance.

But so he's sort of like the ant Man I grew up with reading in the eighties was always this like disheveled guy who had like in broken because like he had this mental breakdown and then like was sort of reviled by all the other superheroes because he hit his wife. Uh oh, and also he is in the comics the guy who invents Ultron, the big bad robot from the Avengers movie. Everybody's like, great, you hit your wife and you invent this robot that accidentally tries to

kill us all the time. Okay, So luckily in the in the Marvel films, we've gotten to move that off and blame that on Tony Stone. Yeah, exactly. They chose to get that to Robert Downey Jr. He was already charming enough. All right, let's let's get into the movie a bit now, before we get into the miniaturization science and the quantum physics and the ultimately what we see some of the ants doing in the picture. You want

to touch on some of the just straight up caper science. Yeah, well, when I was watching it, I was sort of stunned by the scene. So again, if you haven't seen the movie, we're gonna spoil the hell out of it this episode. But uh, Scott Lang, who is the not aunt man at this point. The premise of the movie is that Scott Lang breaks into Hank Pim's house to steal the suit. Uh, the sort of heisty stuff that he does to get

in past. His defenses were science in a way. Uh. And at the time I was watching it and I was like, this is completely false, Like there's no way that you could get past a fingerprint scanner with super glue the way that he does. And in fact, Joe and I are working on something right now about forensic science and superglue. Fuming is a thing that is done to gather fingerprint evidence, and so much so that it's one of the few ways that you can pull a

fingerprint off of a dead body. So there is some science to that, but it's not necessarily. I don't know that you could take the superglue itself, reform it and then turn it into something that a fingerprint scanner would understand, you know, much less do it on a fly like that. And I don't even want to get into doesn't he like freeze the door somehow to say free like filling it with water and then freezing the water. Yeah, yeah,

I maybe there's some science to that one too. I didn't look too deep into that, but I wanted to mention that they at least tried. There's some stuff going on there. The superglue thing is uh slightly accurate. Um. But the reason for this is that they had uh an actual scientist on set who is sort of there, I guess, reference point and adviser. And his name is Dr Spiros Machalicus. Uh. He's from cal Tech, California, and he consulted mainly about quantum physics and the miniaturization stuff.

But you know, maybe he also was like, by the way, you can break into this lock with superglue. All right, so we yeah, we're gonna touch on some of Macalicus's um thoughts and on the science of aunt Man. We're also going to reference the physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios. Yeah, a lot of Greek guys looking into the science of

of superheroes here. Uh. I do want to add here before we dive into this that so obviously it would have been ideal if we had done this right when the movie came out in theaters, but I actually like that we're not because so much was paid attention to the science in articles or an other kind of you know, content that was created around the internet when that movie came out, that we're able to sort of gather it all together, compare notes, and do like the full shebang now,

where um, like wired had some pieces and nerdiced had some pieces, but they didn't have like all of it together. And this I feel like we're able to bring it all together now a couple of months later. Yeah. And plus, if you're like me and you only get out to see a movie in the theater once or twice a year, then then you know this is this is maybe a more ideal time. So let's start off by talking about miniaturization, which again we've seen in so many different science fiction

films and TV shows and comics. But how would it possibly work? So here's the thing, just to get this out of the way. Miniaturization, as we comprehend it is physically impossible based on our understanding of physics. There's so many reasons why it wouldn't work, not even just the miniaturization, but we'll talk later as well as like even if you could come up with some way to miniatureize a body, there's so many things that would go wrong with that body.

Yeah it's miniaturized. Yeah, it's like going from you know, duplos to normal legos or vice versa. Yeah, So as Umkakalios points out in his book, at a very basic level, matters made out of atoms, and the size of an atom is a fundamental length scale of nature, and it's

not open to continue with adjustment. And furthermore, Isaac Asimov, who of course had to crunch the science way back when he did his novelization of Fantastic Voyage, which is interesting because, as I recall the story, there was they said, hey, hey, Isaac, we need should write a novelization of this hot new film, and He's like, how, I don't want to do it, and they finally agreed to let him to get him to do it, provided he got to tweet the science

to try and make it work a little bit him. Yeah, So in his novelization he points out that to make something smaller it requires either one making the atom smaller, to removing a large fraction of the atoms, or three pushing the atoms closer together. Right, And there's I believe Kakalios and others have sort of debunked why those things

wouldn't work either. But yeah, I should also point out we mentioned that the sequel that Dasma did Fantastic Voyage to Destination brain um, and in that he provided his own sci fi model for miniaturization, which was involved the creation of a quote local distortion field that changes the value of planks constant. And that's a that's a physical constant. That is the quantum of action central and quantum mechanics,

and it's a fundamental constant of the universe. But if you could adjust planks constant and therefore make it, I guess planks adjustable. Uh, you could shrink things as you please. But it's all sci fi magic as to how you might do it. And I think that's ultimately a part of any of these models, is there. You can sort of say a point A, and we can get to sort of say point see, and we can get our result. But there's a missing point of magic in there that involved,

and that's what makes it science fiction exactly. Yeah, you have to like the connecting thread between the things, even even as much as you do, you know, I admire that he did the research to sort of kind of come up with various ways, but they don't necessarily connect. But so Cacallios in his book argues that if PIM particles were somehow able to change the mass of electrons, that those particles would then be in closer orbits and

the um. This is called the bore radius. We're gonna end up talking about this and Planks constant quite a bit, and so those particles would be closer in orbit to the respective atoms and molecules that they surround, because electrons and the interactions between them are ultimately what prevent these objects from ever really touching each other. Having all the electrons in an object suddenly game mass would theoretically shrink the whole object. But again I'm not quite sure that

that all adds up. So and like we said, atoms are always the same size right. In fact, they're a third of a nanometer. That's kind of how we quantify them. Uh. This is as planks constant uh implies a constant of quantum mechanics. So if you change the size of an atom, you would have to come up with a mechanism that just changes the value of all constants and science, right, it would just completely throw off physical properties of everything,

not just like shrink things. So so instead Cacalios recommends this changing the bore radius method UH, which is related to the average size of an atom. I don't know, I don't think they actually add up. But there is um another person who did some really great science articles over at Wired dot com. I believe his name is Rhett Elaine. He always does these fun articles looking at the science of superheroes whenever one of these big budget UM superhero movies comes out. He did two articles on

ant Man uh and so he proposed two options. One was, uh ant Man could keep his same mass, but in this scenario his density would increase. Okay, so he shrinks, but he's he's super dense. At half an inch tall, he would be two point eight million times more dense than a regular human. So he would obviously just sink right through everything. You know. He would sink through a tabletop, you would sink through the earth, you know. So it

would be able to ride an around. No, but I kill every and but I remember thinking, like when they when they just naturized him in the film and something, he's showing all these superpowers. I was thinking, well, maybe it's there's a certain amount of density involved, Like essentially, he's this really heavy bullet that can just launch him

like that. He's or like that he's moving the density around in his body somewhere right, Like, maybe he's moving that two point eight million times of density into his fist and that's why when he punches people at super tiny size. I don't know, it doesn't it doesn't quite work out, but that was one of the Lane's best guesses. Uh so there's that. Or he could keep his same density and have a lower mass. But where does the

mask go? And that's essentially the argument of the Stanley science behind this, which is, well, it just goes into an alternate dimension. Um, there's an exhaust pipe of just pure energy. I want to know, I want to like see what this alternate like all Hank pims mass or where what kind of mass is he pulling in when he when he grows larger. But yeah, so the idea here is that you know, but they would potentially also convert to energy, like if you're shunting that kind of

mass around. I think Elaine even says at one point that like that if you do the math on it, the amount of energy that would be created if he was shrinking Downder the size he has could like power a city or something like that. Um, so the best he comes up with is this shifting mass thing, putting it into other dimensions, and the way he looks at it is like, well, he does like an illustration of uh, if you move two dimensions into three dimensions, here's how

it would work. And then he sort of hypothesizes maybe what's going on with ant Man is he's shifting three dimensional mass into a fourth dimension somehow that we're not quite aware of. This would allow him to have the same mass, the same strength and everything, but he wouldn't actually be small, right, It would just be like an illusion because we're seeing like a fourth dimensional object in

third three dimensions or something like that. Yeah, yeah, we have three spatial dimensions in a in a fourth dimension of time, but in this case, it would be a fourth spatial dimension, which makes me, you know, try and imagine it. It's kind of kind of like this big dude and it becomes small and he pushes his excess mass out into a gigantic tumor that extends into another

spatial dimension. This is what I think that the people who are currently working on ant Man comics should be exploring, is like, what does that gross fourth dimension look like? Where he's just pushing mass and pulling mass. There's got to be something creepy to tell you, I'm just imagining like Origami and an aphex twin video coming together. It work perfectly. I think that's what the Edgar Right version of the media. So Okay, So this leads us to

the big question. Yeah, miniaturization is totally impossible. But what about this whole ant man strength thing? Right? So the premises because that's a big, big part of it is not only small. It's one thing to be small and like spying people and maybe move the pins around, but ultimately he's also able to fight dudes that are giants to him. Yeah. In the movies, he's like he can jump with this amount of strength that he would have

if he was normal size. So he's this this ant that's leaping up and jumping around guns and stuff like that and punching people out. Uh. And this goes back to the comics Entails to Astonish number thirty eight. Pim says that he retains all of his normal size and strength when he shrinks. Uh. And Kakalios asks in his book, how does aunt Man punch his way out of a paper bag? And he uses an example from one of the old comics in which aunt Man gets trapped in

a vacuum bag. I think like he gets vacuumed up and he's in the bag, and he just punches his way right through because he's like, well, I have the strength of a normal size guy, and a normal size guy could punch those bags and no, whoop um. There's interesting science behind this that it may be plausible. Now, remember the miniaturization. We don't have an answer for that. But our actual strength comes from our skeleton and our muscles,

and they act like a series of interconnected levers. Right, So think of strength as lift and our arms are the levers that lift things and throw them. Right. Well, if you use the principles of seesaw and torque, as Cacalios does, he argues, aunt Man could punch his way out of a bag. Basically, it goes like this. The ratio of movement in the human arm is one to seven, regardless of what your size is. Right, It's all about the cross sectional area of muscles in our arms. Uh So,

it's not the length that matters, it's sort of their proportions. Okay, So if ant Man, this is Cacalios's math, If aunt Man is point zero to one times his normal height, the force of his muscles provide a reduced factor of ready for it, point zero one squared, which equals point zero zero zero one. And at normal size, if he could punch with a force of two hundred pounds, divide

that by his fist cross sectional size of five square inches. Okay, the pressure his fist applies is forty pounds per square inch. So he's he's making a rough guest that like a normal size person that you know could could probably make about forty pounds per square inch punch. At tiny size, he delivers less force right. In fact, it would be in comparison to the two hundred pounds point zero two pounds.

But his fist is also smaller, so the force per unit area of his tiny punch also comes out to forty pounds per square inch when you do the math, which is point zero two pounds divided by the size of point zero zero zero five square inches for his fifth size. So Cacalias did all this out and he thinks he, regardless of the size, he can punch with the pressure of forty pounds per square inch and therefore punch his way out of the paper bag. But my

question is this what happens when he grows. I know in the Ant Man movie, like he hasn't gotten to that point yet. I'm sure that will be in the sequel where he gets big, right, but like, uh, I think there was a scene where like, uh an ant accidentally like ingested the stuff and got the size of

a dog and it has no problem moving around. Yeah. Yeah, So like, based on this cross sectional area math, does that then mean if like he's Giant Man, that he's still also punching with forty pounds per square inch because it's based on the cross section of his fist size and the force that his arm is applying. Yeah, I mean, there a whole set of constraints that come into play in the when you can't start thinking about the giant side. For instance, Cacalios points out that you could compare Giant

Man to a redwood tree. The taller the tree, the wider the trunk, and in order to provide support for the large mass above it, the tree needs a very broad base. And he says, quote, Giant Man could in principle grow as tall as a redwood tree, but he would have to be just as mobile, so we just immediately fall over. Yeah, yeah, I think I remember there's like a point where they sort of update the comics. Uh. And when he does the giant man thing, that's something

he talks about like he has a really hard time balancing. Uh. Yeah, I mean it just it's a it's more about the anatomy than it is about the size. Yeah. Like an example that I've run across multiple times when dealing with large fantastic creatures, particularly when you're talking about gods, Villa and King Kong and stuff, is think of a cow as a sphere. Okay, a spherical cow. Uh. And as a sphere gets bigger, it's volume increases more rapidly than

its surface area. Double the radius of a sphere and the surface area increases four times, and the volume increases eight times. So you double something size and you keep its proportions the same. Well, that means that the weight doesn't double or even quadruple, it increases by a factor of eight. So a creatures more morphography, especially human morphography, wouldn't be able to match that. You need stocky your limbs.

Um giant man might need to walk around on all fours like a like a like a dinosaur, And then you have to also factor in things like blood flow and other issues like think of the giraffe. Since the giraffe's brain is so far away from its heart, it boasts an extremely high blood blood pressure about twice that found in humans and uh, and plus the giraffe heartbeats up to one seventy times per minute, double that of humans.

And the plumbing is is also a position so that so that there's a special net of arteries and veins that divert blood flow when it lowers its head to drink to keep this increased pressure to the head from making its head explode. Yeah, so okay, The pim particles may address the fictional science of like shunting mass to another dimension, but they certainly don't address all those anatomical needs, both in the large form of giant man or goliath or whatever he wants to call himself this week or

when he gets tiny as a man. Right, It's kind of like thinking from a like an economic uh point of view, Like imagine a McDonald's restaurant in a small town, right, and just thinking about the economic job. But if you just say, hey, let's make this a bigger operation. Let's put one on every street corner, Let's let's do sixteen McDonald's restaurants in this one small town can Does that make sense because it's not isolated, it's not existing in

a bubble. It's tied in to the economic infrastructure of the surrounding area. And that's what we see time and

time again with miniaturization or or or giant man. Is that whatever the size of the being, it's it's atomic structure, it's molecular structure, the it's it's morphography, every every aspect of its existence is tied into the fabric that's going to have to exist in the ecosystem around it that isn't shrinking or growing, right, And that is the hard party then and then involved the building blocks that involves

the function everything. Yeah, and this is you know why, you know, we always hear this, like I don't know what the exact figure is, but like ants are fifty times stronger than human beings are for their proportional size or whatever. This is basically why because that whole cross

sectional anatomy type thing. Right, Okay, so aunt man gets his strength from the fact that an organisms volume is dependent on the cube of its height, right, But if you extrapolate the math all the way outwards, you get these ants that can lift objects that are many times their own mass, Right, So that's where that comes from. It's that the the the anatomy of the ant is

giving them the strength, not necessarily the size. Yeah, and imagined they also took some inspiration from the jumping power of the common Fleet, which is the the most tremendous jumping potential for its size of any creature on the planet. Yeah, that's definitely like the bits where he's like bouncing around

and jumping off bullets and stuff. All Right, So there's a scene in the movie where and this is like I think pretty spoiler ish for the movie, Uh, he shrinks down so small that he enters into do they call it the quantum realm? And they do. Uh. And so basically the fictional premise here is that, like there's something with the suit where like if if you don't regulate it the right way or something, you shrink down

and you're lost forever in the quantum room. And this is what happened to the loss, Like if you try and go too small in order to you know, go through a particularly difficult a material, then you run the risk of just getting smaller and smaller entering the quantum realm and just losing yourself in a place where the rules of of our physical world don't necessarily hope. So this is sort of like the movie logic and comic logic. I guess of like, why he doesn't get smaller than

half an inch tall? Right? Yeah, because he just gets way out of his league, and smaller he gets. And of course there's a This is based in a large part on on on a very real place that we we scientists, actually called the quantum realm. And this is where events play out at distances of nanometers. Many laws and classical physics of the classical physics appear to break down. So in the quantum realm, for instance, scientists can predict

very little with one accuracy. According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you can't even measure the position of an object without disturbing its momentum in an unpredictable way. Classical physics physics also fail to account for this phenomenon, as it serves as a prime example of what we call quantum weirdness. Uh there's also the so called EPR paradox name for

Albert Einstein uh bores Podolski and Nathan Rosen. And this applies an even extants, even stranger example of quantum weirdness, in which to sub atomic particles thousands of light years apart can instantaneously respond to each other's motions. And this is of course quantum entanglement. It takes place at the particle level. And uh and in two thousand nine, I just were actually able to produce the effect with linked superconductors.

So it's it's a place where, yeah, we're thinking the weird things are, We're still trying to understand how everything works. It's also a perfect place for magic and the unexplained

to emerge in a comic. Yeah, and definitely, like I think a lot of people described Aunt Man is like the weirdest superhero you've ever seen, And I think the quantum realm stuff is probably why, because like when he goes into the quantum realm, it's basically like a psychedelic acid trip, right, Yeah, And I thought they did a good job of presenting it that way, because I mean, how do you visually present this quantum realm? And yeah, well, the human senses at that size wouldn't be able to

comprehend what's going on. It's interesting to you ask if they actually call it the quantum realm in the movie. And apparently we can thank Macalicus for that, because they were going to call it the micro verse. Okay, that's that's that's from the comics. That's why I was surprised, because I was like, oh, it's the micro verse. He's gonna go to the micro verse where the micro knots. Right.

But but the thing is, like, apparently micro verse is tied up with some legal issues, so they asked Macalico s. They asked that. They said, hey, what's a better term, and he rattled off a list of possible terms, and they said, oh, quantum realm. That's the one, the real thing. Yeah, it's it's both the real thing and also it sounds far more fantastic than any of the other options. Yeah.

I don't remember what the deal is with the legal issues, but micro Knots is owned by some toy company like it might be Kenner or somebody like, and therefore I think things that are related to that can't be used by Marvel in cinema. So what are some other issues that pop up? All? Right, So let's pretend for a second that we can miniaturize, you can. Let's let's agree with Stanley science or shunting mass off to an alternate tumor dimension. Uh, but there's lots of issues with our

human anatomy when we get to that size. So just think about communicating if you're aunt Man size, right, if you shrink to the size of an ant, your vocal cords will shrink as well, which will ray is your voice from two hundred hurts to about three thousand, four hundred hurts, So you'd have this really high pitched, squeaky voice. So even if he had like the little headset or whatever that allows them to communicate with normal sized people, they would just hear this really high pitched like like

he just I guess sucked in helium or yea. You'd have to have an adapter than his trans uh. And this is from Cacallios, by the way, in his book. And he also did some interviews around the time that the movie came out. Uh. So he also wouldn't be able to aunt Man wouldn't be able to project his voice because he'd have so much less air in his diagram again, like he's shrinking. The size of air. Molis are not shrinking, so he's not gonna be able to

fit them in in his lungs right. Also, the vibrating cilia in his ears would also shrink, which would go from him being able to hear twenty hurts to three d and forty hurts. He wouldn't be able to hear normal human speech, which again is at two hundred hurts, so it would just be like this tone that he's

not able to distinguish. And finally, his vision would be terrible because the size of his eye opening is not a hundred or rather, as ours are hundreds of times greater than the wavelength of light, right, so when he shrinks down now, it would only be like ten times as great as the wavelength of light. This would basically make everything fuzzy and blurred because light waves would be scattering off of his iris and diffracting differently than they

normally do. This is why insects have eyes that are

so drastically different than than our eyes. Yeah, and even so the ant from you know, from whom he takes his namesake, have generally terrible vision, so in a sense that would make it would it would work perfectly that aunt Man couldn't see Jack and we talked about density, you know, briefly, but again, if he can ride on top of an ant, then his mass has got to also decrease in some way, or if his density remains constant, because keep in mind, density equals mass divided by volume,

he's going to sink right through ant. It's so many dead ants um breathing. So I talked about this briefly, right, So, Okay, he's gonna have trouble breathing. And that's they sort of hint at that, right, like that's in the movie. They're like, well, he has to wear the suit like you can't shrink it, Like he has to have a miniaturized air supply as well, because he's miniaturized air molecules to breathe. Yeah, they don't really address how they're miniaturizing the air, but let's let's

assume that that's what they're doing. But essentially the science would go like this. If you were suddenly shrunk down, the air would be like as if you were at the top of the tallest mountain. The amount of air would stay the same, but the volume it occupies would drastically increase relative to you and your new tiny size. So if you're the size of atoms. There's no way you could inhale the billions of oxygen atoms. You would

need to keep your human sized metabolism running smoothly. Again, it ties into the just the economics of this creature and it has to exist within the local economy. Uh and Michael Kas also brought up the idea of ant man would have some problems with cooling down, so because he wouldn't have the same amount of surface area that he normally has to dissipate the heat that his body generates.

Even moderate exertion would generate an incredible amount of heat without anywhere to go, unless maybe the heat is also going to that magical fourth dimensional tumor thing. Yeah, or his suit is operating as a cooling skill suit, which also doesn't work. As Joe and I explored in the Dune episodes, it's all it's yeah, it's all weird, even down to the point where like apparently I think this was another Elaine article that he would run really weird.

So the same way we're talking about, like if your giant size, you would need to have like kind of stumpy legs balance, right, if he gets shrunk down in proportion to the gravitational field. He would be running in this very bizarre way, and it would be like kind of like these small hops is what it would basically look like. Um, and that's not even getting into the serials science. Right, So maybe he can shrink himself, but how does he shrinking his suit or his clothes or

all the other things around him. In the comics they explain it away with something called that Stanley was just like unstable molecules, that's it. And and uh, the unstable molecules are actually a real thing, but these are the molecules that are falling apart or exploding for one reason or another. Uh, So there's that's not really much of an answer. But in in comics that's like, this is how the human torch can like set himself on fire

and his clothes don't burn away. So how Mr Pants, yeah, Hels Pants or Mr Fantastic and stretch really far and his clothes don't rip. Uh, presumably ant Man is also wearing something made of unstable molecules. The closest we've got to this in real life is their shape memory materials, and they basically have an original configuration and then they get deformed, and they can undergo phase transitions based on

like temperature, temperature changes, pressure, or applied electrical fields. So like um superhero example of this, think of Batman in those um Christopher Nolan movies. He applies an electrical field to his cape and it makes it hard so he can kind of glide around, and then the electrical field goes away and it goes back to just being a cape.

It's it's kind of hilarious that that a certain amount of thought and science, or at least science fiction, went into trying to figure out how to make these superheroes wear clothes. But when it comes to the female characters, especially, there's there's a tremendous amount of effort in trying to make them wear as little as possible. So they might as well have just said, hey, sorry, science says that our superheroes can't wear clothes. They have to be naked.

If you really want to go down the internet rabbit hole, look up how many costumes the Wasp has worn over the years. Uh, she's I believe They explain it away at one point by saying like, oh, she's a fashion designer, so she's constantly changing her costume. But like there's like hundreds of costumes and they they go from you know, kind of conservative and moderate too. Yeah, it gets pretty skimpy around the nineties. Okay, so let's talk about these ants.

So the premise the set, the if aunt man's power set is shrinking and controlling ants, right, and they how do they explain it that the helmet somehow amidst frequencies or pheromones or something like that that allow him to control ants movements basically like he's like playing a video game, right. Uh. And the way that they showed in the movie is like Hank pim even whereas like kind of like it looks like a hearing aid, but it's actually like his

little controller, right. Yeah, it's like a what a cybernetic helmet. I think it's sometimes explained, but but again this, yeah, this gets kind of iffy as to how he's actually controlling them because when it comes to ant communication, Um, most of this is happening via those pheromones, Like you say, it's chemical messages detected by other ants through their antenna. And then this is supported by tactile acoustic and least

of all a little visual communication. So we're talking a high pitched chirps strokes with the antenna and for like vibration and how's a helmet going to manage all effect? Right, Yeah, this is from the comics too. I mean they definitely build this into the ant Man character in the comics pretty early because I think that that was how their explanation basically for how he got around was that like he wrote around on ants with wings and that's how he got from one place to another at tiny size.

The interesting part is that if you're looking at it as aunt man manipulating the ants and winning their aid, uh, you know, by making them believe that he's some sort of privileged aunt um there, we actually see versions of this in the natural world. He's he's not the first organism to trick ants into doing his bidding. Okay, I'm guessing this is stuff to blow your minds from guessing a parasite's going to come into play here, you know it. Yeah,

particular type of specialized inverberate parasite. They're known that they're generally known on grouped together as remcca files or ant lovers, and so what they've done is they've they've they tricked

the ant population into accepting or overlooking their intrusion. And there was a two thousand fifteen study published in Plos One that that examined a particular species of beetle Pepa vary And uh, this particular beetle makes its home inside an ant colony, and you know, a heavily guarded, nearly impenetrable fortress that has all of these resources. It seems like the most dangerous place in the world as as

another insect to try and carve out your livelihood. It's like trying to live in more door right as a hobbit, and just like stealing food here and there and just convincing everyone that you're supposed to. Yeah. So this particular beetle, it seems to achieve this through a complex dance of both chemical and auditory mimicry. So it convinces the ant it's one of them, even as it feeds on their

larva and benefits from the colony's protection. Yeah, and uh, it's uh, it seems like this this beetle may even mimic the queen from time to time in order to receive royal treatment from the surrounding colony. It's like backrubs and stuff. Yeah, or you know, just special protection, special special feeding privileges. But but it also knows the limits, like you know, otherwise it leaves the queen unharmed. It

knows that's a line it can't cross. So it doesn't seek to decimate the host colony, but rather to thrive within it as a you know, a perfect parasitic member society. Right if it started to disintegrate it from within, they'd probably catch on. Yeah, so I could see I could see you aunt Man working along those lines. Okay, So there's a scene in aunt Man which is super Exposition where they're basically like training him how to use his powers, and Michael Douglas has hank him does this thing where

he's like, okay, these are like your allies. There's this kind of ant, and this kind of ant, this ants really really good for flying on and this ant's going to build a bridge for you. And this ant stings really hard, right, Like they all have kind of their own superpower that he can apply in various situations. In fact, there's one and they're one that like absorbs electricity or some thing like that. Yeah. Yeah, the crazy ants um which I'll go and talk about the crazy ant a

little bit here. Um, the one that we're most familiar with here in the Estates is the crazy Raspberry ant. And this one continues to make the news, is that you know, invades Texas and Florida. It rolls over fire ant populations. Actually like they end up wiping those guys out, which it might seem like that's a that's good because the crazy ants don't have that painful sting. You don't have to worry about your toddler wandering out and encountering them so much. But they do have a tendency to

just overwhelm home. They'll short out electrical boxes and crawl up into your computer and short that out too, And it's still kind of an open question is to why they seem to crave electricity. But some species of ants are capable of detecting electromatic magnetic fields and might even use the earth magnetic field as a navigational tool. And

the speculation the birds can do that as well. YEA, yeah, so that's like that that's a whole another like realm of sensory realm that we as humans just don't have access to, right, so there would be a good ally to have down there at at this the smaller level of existence. But there's also the theory that crazy ants just mistake the fields associated with electoral electoral gadgetry as road signs. But it's also possible that they're just scouting a new nest and hey, you look at a computer

right here. It's better. It's a dry interior, there are fewer entry points and exit points. It's just a great place by their estimation to secure a stronghold. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so you know, I could see them making good allies. But again, with any of these these ant examples, you also have to say, how is how is aunt Man convincing them to do all these operations so far away from their colony. Yeah, you've seen it more recently than me. I'm trying to remember how

he uses the ants. It's like when he's breaking into the super secure facility, he's somehow crazy short out the system to force field or whatever it is it's keeping him from getting out. Okay, Well, then there's the bridge building ants. Uh. And I have to say I really liked the UM the special effects for how they did the ants in particular. Yeah, they would have favorite parts of the movie. UM, But the bridge bundling ants. That's for real. Um fire ants can act like either a

fluid or a solid. In fact, I think we did something on how stuff works now about this recently and like the last month. It might have been Lauren vocal bobs um. I'll make sure to link to that on the land because it's cool. There's some cool videos from the studies that these guys have been doing. In fact, they're right down the street over at Georgia Tech. Guys Jong Yang Liu and David Hugh have observed this, this fluid solid shifting back and forth between Now it's not

one fire ants shifting back and forth between states. It's a whole colony of them. But they can basically pour themselves out like a liquid or spring back when something presses down on them. In fact, in the video they show like it's not like a brick, but it's something heavy and they're pushing down fifty ants, and the ants all kind of like spring back and forth to allow

for that pushing. Um So fire ants. The reason why they have this ability is they have to cope with periodic downpours in their natural environment, so they evolved the ability to clump together into structures and so um liu and who are using rheometers, which are used to measure the flow of liquids or slurries like cement, uh, to to measure the viscosity and the elasticity of these balls

of ants. And they found out that these fire ants can flow and move around as a group, acting like like thick fluid, right or or or like rubber in some instances. And yes, they construct bridges to get across gaps in the same way that you see them do this in the in the movie. UH. They can also quickly repair any damage to the structure they create. Right. So, like let's say they make a bridge and like a

rock falls and it kills like ten of the ants. Well, the other ants are all they're all gonna sense this and reinforce the living structure and move in um. The researchers actually subjected them to different vibrations to cause them to spring into action and fix the bridge at different frequencies. Uh. And they also pull closer to each other and tighten their grip to fill in holes make sure that the

structure holds together. The practical implications here, apparently are that they're trying to figure out, well, how do these ants do this, so we can replicate it and make self assembling robots. So that would be fairly interesting if we had these little, tiny ant sized robots that could, you know, theoretically form bridges for us to drive across or something. I'm not I'm not quite sure how they would pull it off. It sounds like we're years away from something

like that. It would be pretty cool. Yeah that that, I mean you basically have like a T one thousand kind of Yeah, that's what they compare it to. Yeah. Um, so like the theory is, well, it's not a theory that they show this in the video. Actually, if you drop a penny into a quote ocean of ants, you've just got this pile of ants. They absorbed the impact of the penny dropping that, catching it and then slowly

lowering it to the bottom of whatever they're in. Uh. And these live ants will even let go and behave like they're dead in some instances. So they can help decrease the viscosity of the overall ant structure and allow it to have more of a liquid flow to it.

So that part of the science bridge building ants. Yeah, for real cool And that actually lines up rather nicely with the raft building ants that we also see this is I think the way that he infiltrates High Security lab is that he goes in through the water pipes and you're riding a raft made up of ants joined together into a little structure. And we actually see this, uh with a number of different ants. They bind together

into a raft when cataclysmic floods threatened the colony. And you know, they do this pretty much in the same way you've described the formation of these bridges. Yeah, but but you get into a question like, well, how how do you build that structure? I mean, how do you arrange it? And that gets really interested, Right, how do you decide who's the one which which aunt has to

be underwater and drowned? Yeah, I mean imagine say any group of people, you know, the crew of a pirate ship, and the ship's thinking and they're like, all right, made, he's buying together because we're going to form ourselves a new both made out of your body. So then you know, what do you do? Castraws to see who's going to be at the bottom is going to get to be on top? Well, there's a cool study that looked into this.

The two thousand fourteen study from Jessica Purcell at the University of Lasagne, and she took a closer look at the rafts physical and social structure. Specifically, she looked at the functional geometry of rafts in the ant for micah Cell, yes, these are ants that are a bundant in the floodplains throughout the Apps and the Pyrenees. Unsurprisingly, the queen occupies the center of the raft. She's the most important, she's the package, she is the the ant man of this, uh,

this particular raft. Okay, so this is a scenario where he's probably making them think he's the queen. Yeah, I would imagine he would have to convince them Ham the queen, I'm important. You've gotta get me through. So take tangled worker ants then make up the outside of the raft. And this might come as a shock, but Larval ant that larval aunt brood makes up the lowest portions of the craft, so they put the essentially put the babies

on the bottom, which you wouldn't expect. But yeah, but Lussain found that since the brood the larva are the most buoyant members of the colony, they actually survive exceedingly well down there and ultimately work really well float and so their survival rate is on was on par with the rest of the crew, and when brood items were not available to to build the lower portion of the raft, the worker ants formed the bottom of the raft as well.

But they also presume proved a rather resistant to drowning, but required extended recovery time upon landing. So it's it's it's interesting to imagine these ants and think of the dances as this last ditch survival effort. You just bound bind together into this this raft, this arc when you're delivered to this new location and then everybody just starts setting up a Wow. Yeah, just the social communication and decision making amongst ants is so alien and uh just

alien to how we think about things. Yeah, I mean when I see ants come into my home through the window, sill up onto the kitchen counter, and I kind of think about this stuff. Then it's like how do they how they decide who's the one? Like my wife's really into the like uh non chemical application of like put cinnamon across the window cells because they really don't like cinnamon. Some of them like force their way through the cinnamon and get like cough, they cough, they cough, yea ants cough.

They get covered in this stuff and then you can see them kind of immobile. But the others are like, great, they've made a path for me. I can move on through these make these decisions. Yeah, it's crazy. I feel like we every year there seems like dozens of new ants studies come out. They're always just some really fascinating, really mind blowing bits in there. Like the most recent one that we did a Now video on had to

do with lazy ants. So these ants that are in the colony and they seem to just be standing around doing nothing, and the scientists were trying to figuet why are they doing nothing? Are they Is there something wrong here? Um? Are they reserve troops? That seemed to be a prime theory. So the one theory was that maybe they were laying communications. Yeah, that's what I would think, But they're not. It turns out there less in tune with what's going on in

the colony than anybody else interest in. Huh, Yeah, they just completely tuned out. Okay, so we've covered parasites, we've covered bridge building, we've covered the electricity. Uh, but what was the stinger ant? That was the bullet ant right, like their their their bite is particularly bad. And that's true. Yeah, because we went into that in the Ignoble episode. Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot all about that. Joe covered that section.

So if you want, if you're saying I want to know more about those bulls of ants, go back to our Ignobel Prize episodes from I Believe November and check those out. And there's one thing about the ants too that I don't have in my notes here, but I read it extensively in almost every article about ant man in the Science of ant Man, which is that they get the gender of the ants wrong because well or just aunt Man himself isn't giving male names to female

ants because he isn't. His His buddy aunt is Anthony, and they they're saying like Anthony would actually be a female aunt because of its particular kind of anatomy. Yeah, and I didn't know. I'll buy into that, because what does he know about ants? Yeah, he didn't really seem to have a whole lot of idea about what was going on there. You think he'd do some research, Yeah,

like we did that. Yah. Yeah, that's perfect. I'm looking forward to seeing more of him in these like I think he's going to be in that Captain American movie next year to that, and Corey Stall was really good as the villain. Yeah, Corey Stall from The Strange. We also did a Science of episode. Course. Style seems to be finding himself cast in a lot of movies where movies or television they're like kind of sci fi. Yeah,

he's it's kind of in the mix somehow. He's always like a he was a straight up villain in this, but it's sort of like an anti hero. And in his other protagonist role, Yeah, he's good at playing In House of Cards, he was he played a flawed alcoholic character in that, and then he kind of plays the same thing in the Strain. So he's great at at playing these, uh, these characters with they are fairly cardboard but also have a certain amount of nuance to them.

So yeah, he made for a fun villain. And I like this little zapper that he used one particularly menacing. Yeah. Alright, So there you have it. Just to breakdown of some of the science in ant Man, the film, the comic book series, and also touching on some of these examples of miniaturization science fiction. Obviously, we didn't touch on absolutely everything, uh from ant man or miniaturization side by, So we would love to hear from everybody out there. What's your

favorite piece of ministuration media? Uh, what are your thoughts on the science of aunt Man? Yeah, and let us know about this stuff on social media. When this episode comes out, we're going to share it all over the place, but we will also be responding to and listening to your comments there. Uh, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, all those we are Blow the Mind, and as always

check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is where you will find all the podcast episodes, all those blog posts of some videos, and links out to the social media accounts. And finally, if you want to just talk to us directly about aunt Man or whatever we've covered on the podcast recently, don't forget to tune into those periscope shows on Friday's at noon Eastern Standard time. Will be around for twenty or thirty minutes, talking science,

talking horror movies. Usually we end up talking about some kind of Monster of the Week type scenario. And as always, you to get in touch with this fee email just shoot his one at Blow the Mind at how Stuff Works For more on this and basands of other topics. Is It How stuff Works dot com