Film Theory: Marvel's Ant-Man Could KILL Us All!

so I asked ant-man the other day if he had changed for a dollar you know what he said to me sorry I'm a bit short hello Internet welcome to film Theory where thank goodness our science is better than our jokes so uh Marvel they're kind of a big deal huh I mean I guess it's fair to say since they've redefined comic-book movies made mega stars out of unknown characters and completely changed the way we watch movies not too bad but even with all their successes I would say ant-man maybe one of their biggest sure Avengers was game-changing and guardians was an instant smash but ant-man literally had nothing going for it not even a snarky raccoon I mean seriously ant-man the character isn't unknown the production was a mess and even the trailer was just kind of generic honestly I went to see it simply because you can only play solitaire for so long before the loneliness starts to wait on your cold dead heart forever alone but crippling loneliness be darned I was blown away the characters were loveable the action was spose so clever and it gave me a newfound respect for baskin-robbins asking Robins always finds out but topping that sweet sweet 31 flavor ice cream sundae was the delicious cherry of science because in trying to come up with a perfectly valid explanation for ant man's ability to shrink and grow Marvel without realizing it created the strongest most devastating superhero in on screen universe thus far had the events of the movie been real ant-man would have destroyed the planet it's a detail Marvel overlooked but like baskin-robbins I always find out so Scott Lang the ant-man has the ability to shrink and increase in size this is explained through the use of Pym particles a rare group of subatomic particles that shrink or increase the distance between atoms or the distance between parts of the atom now that may sound crazy but the scientific basis is totally plausible you know how everything around you is made of atoms well atoms are mostly made of empty space take for instance the hydrogen atom which is roughly ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine six percent empty that is a lot of nines which brings us to a mind-blowing fact if you were to squeeze all of the space out of the atoms in the human body if you could fit the particles of the entire human race inside of a sugar cube all of humanity's particles could exist in a volume that small sweets literally which obviously begs the question if your body is made of mostly empty space why can't your hand pass through the computer screen well how do you know have you tried it now that you know the truth seriously reach out touch the screen you just got to believe that I'm obviously trolling you stop smudging your screen of course your hand can't pass through it you think watching a YouTube video is gonna change decade's worth of physics that you know from personal experience I appreciate your faith in me but sadly I do not yet have the ability to bend physical realities of reality but that being said here's a crazy thing in the moment of you touching the screen you weren't actually touching it the chair you're sitting on not touching that either you're hovering on top of it the electrons of the chair are repelling the electrons of your butts negative charges are repelling each other that's why despite being mostly empty space all you overeat your youngsters aren't gonna be able to phase through the walls of the girls locker room anytime soon dare you respect their privacy but what it does mean is that in theory if Pym particles could increase or decrease the distance between atoms they could feasibly we work the fake science makes sense almost the movie explicitly states that Pym particles only change the distance between atoms they don't actually change the number of atoms what that means is that when they change the size of an object the mass stays the same mass aka the quantity of matter the object has a KA the number of atoms so if Scott's mass stays the same but his volume is either shrinking or expanding what's really changing is his density density equals mass divided by volume and messing with this completely changes all the events that you see in the movie including giving Scott the ability to destroy the planet let's break it down take for instance the multiple times Pym particles are used to increase the size of objects the two that immediately pop to mind for me are the giant ant and the Thomas the Tank Engine toy these moments near the end of the movie were unexpected and absolutely hilarious some of the most creative humor I've seen in a movie in a long time but the real-life physics would have made them even more ridiculous on average ants only tend to have a mass of about three milligrams but the Pym particles now expand those three milligrams of mass to a volume the size of a human which is about sixty six point four liters 67 point four if you include my daily liter of Diet Coke throwing that into D equals MV means that the density of the ant would be at point zero four milligrams per liter what's that mean I'll consider this the density of air is 1200 milligrams per liter that ants would be lighter than air he would literally float away a giant creepy ant balloon the same would hold true for the giant Thomas the Tank Engine forget bursting through the house and crushing that cop car the thing would just drift away like a bouncy castle caught in a breeze by the way that sort of thing has actually been a pretty serious problem around the country not rogue Thomas the Tank engines but bouncy castles on the breeze in 2011 alone at least ten bouncy castles either floated away or collapse because they weren't properly tied up injuring more than 40 people it's like a twisted version of up so parents remember guns don't kill people this public service announcement is brought to you by the film theorists Council for public safety long story short haphazardly tossing those enlarging shuriken z' around would result in some pretty bizarre balloon creatures and of course the opposite effect would also occur if you took something big and heavy and used Pym particles to make it a lot smaller say for instance a tank on a keychain perhaps after doing the research the particular tank Hank Pym uses as a keychain was a t-34 Soviet combat vehicle weighing in at approximately twenty six point five tonne I don't think I really need to explain how that much weight on a keychain might be a bit tough to tote around probably ruining a pair of pants or two have you kept it in your pocket however the tank wouldn't be the only thing that'd be a problem if it was shrunken down like in the film so would our lovable hero Scott Lang throughout the movie Scott takes advantage of his new size to speak into several places whether it be by riding on ants or hiding and clothing or whatever okay so let's say that Scott weighs roughly 200 pounds of pure Paul Rudd muscles there would be absolutely no way Antony or any of the other ants for that matter would be able to support that amount of weight I mean ants are able to lift 5,000 times their own mast don't get me wrong but when your mass is only 3 milligrams that's still just 15 grams Scott at 200 pounds would have a mass of roughly 90,000 grams he would squish them long before they entered battle and forget all those scenes where ant-man is climbing on people or lambs on their gun or whatever putting that much weight on a small surface area could have some pretty devastating consequences the movie briefly toys with this idea when Scott first changes into the suit and tests it out he falls out of the bathtub and when he lands on the tiles of the bathroom floor you can see them visibly crack under his weight they then promptly forget this little scientific detail but now imagine that Scott punches a dude in the face when he's the size of an ant because this fist would be a super dense ball of mass focused an incredibly tiny surface area his hand would be like the point of a knife for a needle easily breaking through the skin of his enemies if he ran and jumped at someone there's a high likelihood that he functioned just like a bullet a dense ball of mass shooting his way through his enemy but that's not even scratching the surface of Scotts true power now we're at the true insanity of what he could do at the end of the movies Scott must turn off his suits regulator the device that protects him from shrinking to small in order to squeeze between the molecules of Yellowjackets power pack he does this so he can save his daughter but in doing so get this he would have created a black hole now whatever you think of black holes images of giant planet eating tears in space-time probably come to mind stars that have died and collapsed in on themselves bodies with unimaginable mass however any amount of mass can actually become a black hole if it becomes dense enough this is illustrated in a concept known as the Schwarzschild radius basically this is the radius of a sphere that if all the mass of an object were compressed within that sphere the escape velocity from it would equal the speed of light everything within this radius becomes a black hole so I did the calculations and assuming that Scott weighs right around 200 pounds and has a mass of roughly 90 kilograms he would achieve enough density to become a black hole if he was shrunken down to a radius of roughly one point 40 times 10 to the negative 22nd millimeters which is tiny in the film Scott turns off his suit safety switch and shrinks down quickly he's shrinking past cells and molecules we then see him shrink past the size of an atom but even then he's not small enough but lucky for us he keeps going from the way this scene is designed he gets smaller than quark s' which is an elementary particle ie particles that aren't made up of any other smaller substance at least we haven't yet identified what those smaller substances are quarks are the pieces that make up protons and Tron's but he gets smaller yet by the time he finally stops shrinking he's surrounded by these weird flat crystal like structures phallic fractals are a super trippy screensaver now it's unclear what exactly they are but from their design they appear to be an artistic rendering of strings from string theory it's a long story what exactly they are and it's better left to another theory so let's just say this between them and quarks Scott at this point is really really small as small as 10 to the negative 32nd millimeters which considering his mass is small enough to create the density we need to form a black hole and here's the really fun part this would be a mini black hole that would dissipate in the fraction of a second this would in fact be a very viable black hole black holes decay by a process known as Hawking radiation named after Stephen Hawking as you can imagine the more mass the black hole has the longer can stay viable and start sucking in more mass to grow according to medium.com the least amount of mass that a black hole could stay viable with is point zero zero zero zero two grams but remember we have nearly 200 pounds of sexy Paul Rudd to feed our little baby black hole giving it plenty of mass to survive Hawking radiation decay and plenty of time to start sucking in particles from around it eventually growing so large it would swallow the world as we know it the brutal irony here is that in trying to save his daughter's life Scott Lang would have doomed not just her life but the entire planet including all our ant balloons and tank keychains so suck on that Thor even your godlike powers are no match for the Ant Man is it going to change the name but hey that's just a theory all film theory and cut oh and I should mention that the movies ending overlooks the fact that Scott's atoms can't act shrinks taller than atoms themselves if Pym particles are just reducing the space between atoms than the size scott shrinks to is actually impossible based on the explanation you received in the movie he's still made of atoms the particles themselves aren't shrinking it's the space between them that is meaning that he can't get to those crazy small sizes sorry Marvel you were better off sticking with explanation from the comic books

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 13,313,639

Rating: 4.8986135 out of 5

Keywords: Marvel, ant man, Ant-Man (Film Character), antman, Paul Rudd (Celebrity), Comic Book (Comic Book Genre), Marvel Comics (Production Company), Science Fiction Movies, Film (Media Genre), Film Theory (Field Of Study), film theory, matpat, Film Theorists, Game Theorists

Id: 0-MhE0J9Tx8

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/DoctorBoson]

Much as I love Game/Film Theory, the Pym Particle isn't something that is particularly well explained in the MCU (as mass couldn't be constant for the movie to make sense), so taking science to it is pretty silly. Still an interesting watch, though.

[u/the_bryce_is_right]

I look at Ant-Man like I look at the deflector dish in Star Trek. It just works, no explanation necessary.

[u/BenReilly616]

My little brother tries to ruin movies like this for me all the time.

"well scientifically"

Shut the fuck up, BRIAN, its a fucking comic book movie about ants.

[u/halarioushandle]

If this were true than all of the events of Ant-Man wouldn't have happened. Wasp would have ended the world a long time ago...

[u/Port-Chrome]

That different intro is not as good as the other one.

[u/PlopKitties]

What movie was that with the super you'd Robert Downey Jr.?