Do Not Shrink: This Is Why You’ll Never Be Like Ant-Man

Ant-Man’s shrinking technology is super cool in theory and on the big screen. It even lets you shrink and grow by just pushing a button. Who knows, after real-life seems to be able to catch up with speculative tech in Science-Fiction on so many occasions, someone will actually try to invent a suit that makes shrinking possible.

Before you now jump and attempt to replicate this technology, you better watch this video as shrinking unfortunately seems to remain ‘wishful thinking’:

You see, it’s not really just a problem of being trapped small or learning how the world works at ant-size, there a some more ‘practical’ issues with being a super-tiny human.

You’d never guessed it, but our eyes are not able to function at this level, because our irises would be tiny as well. Tiny iris means — no light passing through it. We wouldn’t be heard anyway, as we’d speak at different frequencies that ‘normal humans’ do not hear. Besides, a heated suit would really come in handy, since we would have so much less volume to make body heat ourselves.

Of course, all of this could be managed someway, but here comes the show-stopper: You probably know about hemoglobin being this important molecule in red blood cells that carries our oxygen? Hemoglobin would shrink too, but the oxygen molecules it needs to carry would not, so that your brain most likely would shut it all down within minutes.

Don’t be afraid, no one in his right mind builds a shrink-ray as it’s not possible to remove the necessary matter from the body, at all. That would kill you, too! It’s a question of quantum probability or, to be more precise, the Uncertainty principle proposed by Heisenberg. In order to take empty space out of atoms while shrinking, you’d first need to know where exactly the particles are… and that’s something we can only guess. Pushing atoms together in hope of achieving the same result doesn’t work either, since electrons generally do not occupy the same space at one time.

So, in case you’d like to be a super-hero, you better look for other ways, as size obviously matters in science… at least in this field.

This article was originally published on pionic.