MovieChat Forums > Fantastic Voyage (1966) Discussion > Scientific mistakes

Scientific mistakes

posted 18 years ago by andreas-schmidt-pabst
12 replies | jump to latest

If the submarine´s crew had been shrunked on atomic level, they wouldn´t be able to breathe the air out of the lungs of the body they are in. The oxygen atoms would be too big to connect with the hemoglobyn of the shrunked red blood cells.
Same thing is in "Innerspace", when Dennis Quaide is adviced to bring new air in his capsule from the lungs and when he drinks whiskey out of Martin Shorts gullet: What he get there is, in his dimensions, no real whiskey, because its atoms would be much bigger and the ingredients more separated.

And I also think, that there are mistakes in the scale: If the submarine is the thousandth of a millimeter long, the needle of the syringe and the various parts of the body would had to be much bigger for it.

"Hooters, hooters, yum yum yum,
Hooters, hooters, on a girl that´s dumb!"
The Bundy credo

[–] Unicorn-9 18 years ago

Well, the whole movie makes no sense. Just to give one glaring example, a miniaturised submarine wouldn't float in water (gravitational force is proportional to mass, whereas displacement lift is proportional to volume), so sailing around the body would be impossible.

So worrying about scientific accuracy is a bit pointless when the whole story would be impossible if it was accurate :).

[–] andreas-schmidt-pabst 18 years ago

Thanks for the quick reply! Very interesting that with the gravity and the displacement lift. I didn´t know that.

"Hooters, hooters, yum yum yum,
Hooters, hooters, on a girl that´s dumb!"
The Bundy credo

[–] Nobody_Gives_A_Damn 18 years ago

Damn! All the years of trying to perfect my miniurization machine were all for nought! I should have known there would be a catch!

Keef

[–] anmkevin 17 years ago

And don't forget that the water they injected into the man would grow back to normal size as well, making him a bloated balloon.

[–] flyer333555 17 years ago

Since patients in that state are fitted with a Foley catheter, all that extra water would have come out when it started to expand. Although it would have made a mess.8-}

A foley catheter, if you do not know, is a tube inserted through the urethra to catch urine in a bag. Although all that water suddenly expanding would have made that bag explode.

Another thought. Do we know exactly where the water came out? Wasn't the Protheus miniaturized first, then added to water in a syringue? I do not recall the syringue and water in it being miniaturized. If so I think the water may have been plasma taken from the patient...

[–] Unicorn-9 17 years ago

"I do not recall the syringue and water in it being miniaturized."

Then you missed that part :). If I remember correctly, they miniaturise the submarine, put it in an extra-large syringe, then miniaturise the syringe and submarine.

At least that's how they did it in the book, I haven't watched the movie in months; at the end of the process the sub would be far too small to pick up and put in a normal syringe.

[–] 17 years ago

[deleted]

[–] andreas-schmidt-pabst 16 years ago

But the syringe has to be much bigger, if it and the submarine shrink at the same rate.

"Hooters, hooters, yum yum yum,
Hooters, hooters, on a girl that´s dumb!"
The Bundy credo

[–] Unicorn-9 16 years ago

Yeah, in the book the syringe was huge until they miniaturised it (a foot or more across?). So the water from the syringe would make the guy explode if they didn't remove it before it deminiaturised.

I vaguely remember a similar process in the movie, but haven't watched it in a while.

[–] 16 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Unicorn-9 16 years ago

"I seem to remember that in the book the wreckage of the Proteus was dragged out, enveloped in a white blood cell, by one of the crew as they escaped."

Yeah, that's in there too.

It's odd that I remember the book better than I remember the movie; I guess it's because I read the book before I saw the movie.

[–] scotbpens 16 years ago

In the movie, the full-size Proteus is first reduced to about two inches in length ("Phase 1"). The partially miniaturized sub is then dropped into a transparent water-filled cylinder about 3 feet across ("Phase 2"). Finally, the cylinder is reduced to about 1/4 inch in diameter, a needle is attached, and it becomes a hypodermic syringe ("Phase 3").

Problem is, if you do the math, the fully-shrunken Proteus is roughly one one-hundredth of an inch long -- hardly the size of a microbe. More like the size of a grain of sand! Can anyone say "embolism"?