MovieChat Forums > Fantastic Voyage (1966) Discussion > The shrinkage math is wrong

The shrinkage math is wrong

posted 11 years ago by sargon19552003
2 replies | jump to latest

They got the degree of shrinkage wrong in the film. After the first stage, the sub appears to be about 1 cm long. It's then put in a giant hypodermic container, which is then shrunk. Let's say the container starts with a diameter of 50 cm, and is shrunk down to 1 cm. That means the sub is shrunk down to 0.2 mm. That's small, but it's NOT microscopic. They really needed to do a third stage, and shrink the size down by another factor of 30, which would make the sub about the size of a red blood cell.

[–] dpcole7 11 years ago

That and the technobabble for the nuclear element - if it shrank along with everything else and it would have, it still could not have powered the ship.

There were a number of scenes that seemed a little "Well, that was known in 1966 but it's no longer 1966 and more recent discoveries kinda disprove that but then again the target audience isn't in science..."

Technobabble and biobabble aside, it's a solid movie...

[–] kurthowe 9 years ago

...assuming that the rate of miniaturization is constant (which is never addressed by the film). Thus, it's not an error.