Fantastic voyage, Inner Space, Honey! I shrunk the kids. Odo in DS9.
These are fun to watch alright but always trouble me.
I can live with Tranporter, Warp drive, food synthesizer, parallel space, but miniatualization is way beyond my tolerance. How heavy would Prometheus be? Some 30 tons? Is there any explanation or comment on this subject in the film?
You may somehow make it smaller but you never can make it lighter. Am I wrong?
I'm reading Isaac Asimov's book right now, and he covers all your objections, which were mine as well. His solution is pretty cool.
sharewhich book?
That would be Fantastic Voyage.
http://www.amazon.com/Fantastic-Voyage-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553275720
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage
Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 science fiction film written by Harry Kleiner. Bantam Books obtained the rights for a paperback novelization based on the screenplay and approached Isaac Asimov to write it. Because the novelization was released six months before the movie, many people mistakenly believed Asimov's book had inspired the movie.
OP, the correct word is "miniaturization."
~I can sing better than Taylor Hicks!
I dont understand why it's beyond you ??
Water is 1 kilogram/Liter.... If you transform 1 Liter into 1 ML, it will weight 1 miligram instead of 1 kilogram. Just like the Protherus... the density still the same. Why would it changes ? It would be totally ridiculous !?
You answered you own question in your post...
If something is smaller, it will indeed be lighter. It's a simple fact that even underage childs can understand.
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If you "transform" a liter of water into one ML, you are compressing it 1000x what you had; meaning there is as much of a quantity of the material [mass] as before. So it would still be one KG. What you are talking about is removing 99.9% of that mass, and THAT is what is 'beyond you.' In this movie, they are not removing the mass of the submarine, crew, equipment, et al, they are compressing it, or else they would only have that tiny fraction of everything that is themselves, including their brains. If you think they are removing 99.99..% of the crew and ship, then where does most of it go?
shareWe are talking about an hypothetical technology, there is nowhere in the movie where they say they are compressing it. And if you compress something, like water, x1000, it will just evaporate cause the temperature would rise due to the compression.
In the movie they are transforming the matter into a smaller scale. The mass is not gone, the mass is reduced then expanded.
But anyway, this is all hypothetical and to me, this is what make sense. And for this movie there was a lot of research done to be sure there is no plot holes or goofs. It's the same in the book.
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''L'important c'est pas la chute, c'est l'atterrissage''
Using only classical physics, it would seem that the only way to reduce something is to either remove (in exact proportion) all the molecules in the target object or to keep all the molecules and squeeze them closer together.
The first approach, when used on a human, would leave a virus-sized person with far too few brain cells to think (among other problems.)
The second approach might get around that problem but then you would have, as suggested above, a virus-sized man (or submarine) weighing tons--and the density approaching that of a neutron star.
Leaving classical physics behind (and inventing a technology that might never exist) we have a possible answer: Tweak the Higgs Field (if it exists) in such a way that as we compress the objects we decrease the mass of them. That way the reduced submarine will function as well microscopically as full-sized and Raquel Welsh will appear just as appealing regardless of size or mass.
This is explained in the novelization (and, I believe, in the movie). When Grant arrives at the CMDF, he says that he was taught in school that miniaturization is not possible, for exactly the reasons you list: the only possibilities are to remove atoms or to compress matter, both of which are infeasible. He is then told that this is intentional disinformation, propagated to discourage investigation of miniaturization and to protect the secret that miniaturization is actually already in use. He's told that the process is analogous to photographic reduction: the atoms themselves are made smaller, they aren't removed or squeezed. This is complete hand-waving nonsense, but then at lot of real physics is counterintuitive as well.
One thing never explained is how they can see: relative to tiny eyeballs, visible light wavelengths would be huge and invisible. They'd have to use wavelengths somewhere in the upper X-ray range, which they wouldn't be able to see anyway, because their photoreceptors wouldn't respond to X-rays. The light waves must be getting miniaturized, too.
In fact, they must be inside a space warp. Yeah, that's the ticket: the Proteus just inhabits its own universe, which is smaller than our universe.
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According to your logic, when you compress a sponge, it weighs less.
You don't "transform" 1 liter of water into 1 ml of water, without either removing 999 ml of the water, or compressing it.
He couldn't have removed 99.9% of the atoms from the humans and ship, without killing them.
Therefore, all atoms are still there, which means they have the same mass.
Like a blackhole, You are right.
share[deleted]
You are correct.
The size would decrease, but the mass would stay the same and as soon as they entered the diplomat's body they would fall through his body, piercing all of the skin, tissue, and sinew it encounters.
Then it would fall into the ground and would probably be heavy enough to keep digging its way down closer to the center of the earth until it met rock dense enough to prop it up, assuming there is such rock in the center of the earth... I'm not really sure.
Look...the film has "Fantastic" right in the title. Of course it makes no sense realistically. In the film's Universe...miniaturized eyes and ears have no problem seeing and hearing, a miniaturized ship and crew weigh next to nothing, a bodies natural defenses identify threats immediately, and miniturized matter simply ceases to exist when absorbed by a white blood cell.
share