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Ant-Man's Quantum Realm: can you shrink into it?

Movie · Ant-Man (2015), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Real seed. One true idea sits underneath. Everything built on it is invented.

What the scene or the claim says

Shrink small enough and you slip into a separate realm below the atoms, where time and space behave differently.

What is real

Quantum mechanics really is the physics of small things, and atoms really do behave unlike baseballs. An electron in a hydrogen atom is spread over a region about 10⁻¹⁰ m wide, and the size of that region, the Bohr radius (5.29 × 10⁻¹¹ m), is set by the electron's mass, its charge and Planck's constant.

What stops it working that way

• There is no smaller world underneath ours. The quantum regime is the same world seen at a scale where wave behaviour cannot be ignored.
• Atom size comes from those constants, not from how much of you there is. You cannot shrink a body and keep its atoms' chemistry: either you remove atoms, and it is no longer you, or you change the constants, and nothing works as before.
• No physics has time running differently "in the quantum scale". Time dilation comes from speed and gravity.

If you wanted it to work

Suppose some field rescaled the length that sets atom sizes, say through a change in the electron's mass or in the strength of electromagnetism. Atoms would shrink. Physicists do test whether such constants drift, and atomic-clock comparisons find no drift in the fine-structure constant or the proton-to-electron mass ratio within their precision. Even if one did, you would be rescaling chemistry itself, and you would arrive in the same universe, only smaller.

Learn the physics

• Quantum mechanics vs computing
• What is a qubit made of?

Sources

• Bohr radius (NIST CODATA)

See it in the swipe deck, with the other cards.