The Science of 'Ant-Man'

The 2015 movie "Ant-Man" continues a long Hollywood tradition of miniaturization sci-fi, but how much real science is there in this tale of tiny superheroes and lovable ants? Join Robert and Christian as they shrink down to the film's level and discuss physics, the quantum realm and the fantastic world of ant biology.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Exitement. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop
Works dot com. Hey you wasn't a stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger,
and today we're gonna be talking about it Man, the
famous tiny little superhero who was on the big screen

(00:24):
over the summer, and about the science behind it miniaturization
and it's all different kinds of crazy, wacky science things
that are actually some are true and some are not.
Before we get into that, though, I want to remind
the audience that we do more than just podcast. In fact,
if you follow us on social media Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler,
you're gonna see all the other things that we're putting

(00:45):
out there. We've got videos like how stuff works now,
videos about weird science and technology. We're also doing blog
posts over on stuff to Blow your Mind dot com
every day, So make sure that you subscribe to whichever
one of those you know channels is your particular favorite
social media thing, and follow us there because we're, you know,
curating stuff all the time. And if you listen to

(01:06):
us on iTunes, do us a favor. Head on over
to iTunes and give us a nice review. Help boost
that algorithm in our favor. It's a great way to
support our show. And one last thing, we have started
working on the other social media platform called Periscope. We've
been doing it for about, I guess two months now,
and we try every Friday at noon Eastern Standard time

(01:26):
to be available for about twenty or thirty minutes hang
out with our audience, talk to you about what's going
on with the show, what we're recording, what we're researching,
and what we have coming up in the next couple
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

(01:48):
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

(02:12):
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,

(02:35):
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,

(02:56):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:39):
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,

(04:03):
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,

(04:26):
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

(04:47):
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

(05:07):
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

(05:29):
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

(05:52):
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

(06:14):
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

(06:37):
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

(06:57):
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

(07:19):
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

(07:41):
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

(08:04):
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.

(08:27):
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.

(08:49):
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

(09:12):
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,

(09:35):
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

(09:55):
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

(10:16):
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

(10:40):
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,

(11:01):
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

(11:23):
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

(11:44):
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.

(12:05):
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,

(12:27):
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

(12:48):
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

(13:12):
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,

(13:33):
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

(13:55):
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

(14:16):
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

(14:38):
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

(14:59):
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

(15:21):
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

(15:43):
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

(16:04):
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

(16:26):
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,

(16:48):
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

(17:10):
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

(17:32):
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.

(17:56):
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.

(18:18):
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,

(18:38):
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

(19:01):
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

(19:22):
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,

(19:46):
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

(20:07):
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,

(20:31):
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,

(20:54):
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

(21:15):
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.

(21:38):
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

(21:59):
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.

(22:20):
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

(22:41):
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

(23:02):
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,

(23:25):
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

(23:48):
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

(24:12):
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,

(24:33):
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.

(24:53):
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

(25:17):
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

(25:38):
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

(26:01):
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

(26:24):
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

(26:46):
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

(27:07):
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

(27:28):
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

(27:49):
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,

(28:12):
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

(28:32):
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,

(28:55):
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,

(29:16):
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.

(29:37):
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

(30:00):
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

(30:21):
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,

(30:43):
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

(31:03):
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

(31:24):
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

(31:46):
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.

(32:07):
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

(32:29):
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

(32:50):
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,

(33:15):
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

(33:36):
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

(33:58):
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

(34:20):
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

(34:40):
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

(35:02):
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

(35:22):
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.

(35:45):
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

(36:06):
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

(36:28):
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

(36:53):
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

(37:15):
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,

(37:36):
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

(37:56):
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,

(38:17):
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

(38:38):
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

(39:00):
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

(39:22):
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

(39:45):
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

(40:09):
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

(40:30):
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

(40:50):
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,

(41:12):
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

(41:33):
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

(41:54):
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

(42:18):
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.

(42:40):
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

(43:04):
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

(43:24):
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,

(43:47):
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

(44:10):
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

(44:30):
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

(44:51):
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

(45:14):
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,

(45:36):
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

(45:57):
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

(46:19):
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

(46:42):
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

(47:05):
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

(47:27):
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

(47:48):
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,

(48:10):
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

(48:33):
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,

(48:56):
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

(49:18):
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

(49:39):
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,

(50:00):
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

(50:21):
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

(50:43):
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

(51:04):
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

(51:26):
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

(51:47):
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

(52:09):
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

(52:30):
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

(52:51):
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

(53:12):
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.

(53:34):
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

(53:54):
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

(54:15):
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

(54:36):
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

(54:58):
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,

(55:20):
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,

(55:42):
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

(56:05):
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

(56:27):
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,

(56:49):
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

(57:10):
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

(57:30):
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,

(57:52):
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

(58:13):
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

(58:34):
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,

(58:54):
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

(59:15):
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

(59:37):
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

(59:58):
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

(01:00:20):
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,

(01:00:43):
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

(01:01:03):
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,

(01:01:24):
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.

(01:01:48):
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.

(01:02:17):
Is It How stuff Works dot com