Imagicnation #02 | What Would Happen if You Were Shrunk?

Hello everyone ! Welcome to the brand new episode of Imagicnation ! A place where we will find out the answers to some of the most interesting & curious questions related to science... 

Hey guys…just a simple question…when did you last go for a tour?? No no…I mean to a tour of imagination/fiction…was it during your childhood, or was it when you were watching a movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe??? Well, whatever be your answer, I just wanted to say you that get ready…we are just about to get there again… 

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Actually, 3 days ago, after finishing my previous post on , I was extremely tired. Wondering what to write on next frustrated me even more. Just then I thought of playing of my favourite fiction movies…Antman…which led me to the question that: 

What Would Happen if You Were Shrunk?  

Ooo wow...are you thinking that it would be fun being shrunk??…well, then I must say that you are wrong…Actually, being diminished in size to half an centimeters tall is pretty bad for you. If you were to be scaled down to such an extent, there are few probabilities that could occur.

Antman

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First probability: 

Let’s suppose that only your body size would change, but your mass, i.e the amount of matter you contain, remains the same. This would mean that you’d be extremely dense…about 150,000 times more than the densest thing we have ever found on Earth, “Osmium”. 

Fig. Osmium

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Being that dense would be a huge problem. With your ant-sized proportions, you would be employing all that weight over the same area. Only certain few things like diamond or carbon fiber could withstand such great pressures without cracking due to your presence. In fact, your density would be comparable with a white dwarf, a star that has used up all of its Hydrogen and collapsed in on itself due to gravity. Imagine the whole mass of the Sun fitting into something as relatively small as the Earth.  

Hello…hello…are you hearing me??

No?? Well, at this stage I can’t hear you either. But yaaa, I can explain this! Our normal full-sized ear responds to frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz because of the way the hair cells in our cochlea vibrate. The normal full sized human voices fall between 85 and 255 Hz, but since your inner ear has been so small, you can’t hear anything less than maybe 400 to 500 Hz. 

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And the reason why I can’t hear your voice is simply because at this stage, the of size your vocal cord would be very small, so the vibrations would have much smaller wavelengths. As said earlier, typical human voices have frequencies of 85-255 Hz, but a shrunken man would talk at a very higher frequencies of 12 to 26 kHz !!! And, if would speak between 12 and 26 kHz, it would sound somewhat like the squeak of a rat . All very exciting but this is us assuming that your mass would remain constant while being shrunk. If that were the case, none of this would matter because your body would be crushed by the incapability to support your whole weight. Sooo, let’s go and try the other option… 

Second probability:

 If our mass decreased proportionally with our body size, we would weight about 0.03 grams, that’s about the weight of 10 snowflakes. As you can imagine, even a slight breeze of 8.5 mph about the same speed of a normal full size human exhaling could sweep you away. A sneeze would be even more destructive at 100mph. However, you might be able to outpace it. If we were able to scale ants up to human proportions, they would be traveling at around 52 mph. In fact, almost all tiny sized organisms would be moving really fast. Paratarsotomus macropalpis, a sesameseedsized mite, is the fastest recorded animal relative to its size. It runs at 322 body lengths per second which is equivalent to a human running at 1300 mph. 

Fig. Paratarsotomus macropalpis

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And now, that you are as small as the insect, you’d be faster as well, thanks to the Froude Number. The Froude Number is actually equal to the centripetal force which is involved in making your legs swing, divided by the gravitational force which is exerted on your legs.  So, by reducing yourself down and keeping your Froude number constant, you would actually take 12 times more steps than if you were normal full sized. Add to the fact your steps would be 66% bigger, you’d be 20 times faster than normal ! What could slow you down?? There’s a lot of things that could slow you down but one easily available thing could be water. At your ant scale, fluids act 21,000 times thicker than we’re used to – meaning that it would be like swimming through a chocolate syrup. But, the good news is that you would literally be able to walk on water !!

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Water’s surface tension would be able to withstand you without breaking. Ants do this most of the time and also form firmly interweaved rafts to carry themselves across rivers. And as long as the surface tension remains intact, you won’t suffer a terrible watery death. 

What would happen to the inside of your body ??

Actually, at that stage you would feel extremely cold. When you are about 100 times shrunk, means you’ve got about 10,000 times less surface area and a million times less volume to make your body heat. So, for that you would really need to eat like a hummingbird just to keep from freezing to death, and by that I mean eating every hour of every day.

Conclusion: 

Actually, I’m pretty sure that you would just break several laws of physics. Shrinking someone to any size should not be possible. But what if we could eliminate the empty space in your atoms? 

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The nucleus holds more than 99% of an atom’s mass, but it’s 100,000 times smaller than an atom is wide. In other words, if a nucleus was the size of a marble, then the whole atom would be the size of a football stadium. But the problem is, this isn’t how atoms really work. Electrons aren’t exactly at a specific place. At any instant, we can’t predict for certain where an electron will be orbiting.

Table fan

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For better understanding, let’s imagine a spinning table fan. We know there are three blades in there, but we can’t say precisely where they are. But if we put your hand inside, we’re definitely going to find one. Hence, an electron’s orbit is like a cloud of places it could be, and an atom’s empty space isn’t actually “EMPTY”, the way we normally think of it. And that’s the weirdness of quantum mechanics. We also can’t shrink you just by forcing your atoms closer together, or that would completely violate the Pauli’s Exclusion Principle. 

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Thus, our cloud view of electrons only suggests us where we’ll probably find them, but if we push two atoms closer together without bonding them, the higher the probability that two of their electrons would be found in the same quantum state….and in this universe, that’s just not permitted. We could only add energy and move electrons to higher orbitals all on their own but that would take tremendous pressures approaching the inside of a planet or a star…not certainly good for your health…!

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That’s all for today… 

Hope you enjoyed the tour… 

If you did, please feel free to express your thoughts in the comment section below…

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References used: 

 

1) Source 1 

2) Source 2 

3) Source 3  

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Last three science episodes:

1)  Imagicnation #01 | How much plastic is in the ocean ??

2)  Life #01 | The Most Important Moment in the History of Life on Earth ! !

3)  Health #04 | Alopecia Areata: The autoimmune hair disorder !