We’ve all seen pictures and video of what purports to be miniature people - fairies like Tinkerbell are a few inches high, and the kids in Honey I Shrunk the Kids were a quarter inch high. Typically these representations show the people experiencing physics rather similar to ours - for the movie, for example, they created it by making oversized sets and shooting with ordinary-sized people rather than by actually shrinking the actors down, presumably for budgetary reasons. This of course resulted in the miniature humans existing in an oversized world that otherwise behaved pretty normally, give or take a few cases where the shots of the big normal-sized people were slowed down, presumably for dramatic reasons and/or to avoid completely weirding out the audience with gigantic things moving lightning fast.
In reality, I’m thinking that that would not be how it would work. For convenience of calculation assume a scaling down by a factor of ten (rather than the 200-250:1 or so in the movie); thus your average six-foot-tall person would be 7.2 inches tall. Your standard fairy, in other words. As to the mechanism of shrinkage, presume that it results in objects of reduced mass, built of a reduced number of ordinary-sized atoms (to be able to interact half-normally with the rest of the world), which are artfully arranged into something functionally resembling a miniature of the original. We will presume that it’s possible to assemble miniature cells and neurons and muscle fibers this way and have them vaguely approximate normal behavior; assume a certain amount of magic is involved, if necessary
So. After you pop out of the other end of the RoadRunner’s pipe, what’s the world like? Big, yes, we get that. But what about the details?
You now are 1/10th of your original height, with 1/1000th the mass, and 1/100’s the cross section on all your limbs and muscles.
What looked like a meter to you is now a decameter, and ten centimeters now looks like a meter to you. Or, a millimeter now looks like a centimeter to you. Thus much is pretty easy to figure out.
Gravity is now ten times as strong - objects appear to fall (nearly) ten times as fast, crossing the six inches between your shoulder height and the floor much faster than they crossed the original five feet there would have been.
The speed of light now appears to be ten times as fast, relative to what you’re used to. Hmm, would the (relative) faster movement of electrons in your mini-neurons cause you to think faster, causing the world around you to appear slower as a result? Would this counteract the apparent increased speed of falling objects? Would the appearance of their acceleration be different?
What about sound? I suspect that your experience of pitch would change due to wavelengths being bigger relative to you, but that’s just a guess. Would it? And, what if we assume your experience of the world is faster, would that counteract it?
How would you experience the square/cube law? Suppose you found a splinter that was one centimeter long and a millimeter in diameter. How would your interaction with that compare with the ten-centimeter-long, one-centimeter thick wooden rod it now appears to be? Would it seem as heavy to you as the rod would have, and would it be as hard for you to snap, with your scaled-down arms, as the rod would have been? Could you throw it as far, from your perspective? And what would the arc of flight look like?
What about air resistance? Would the air seem thicker to you, or what?
Is there anything else important that I’m missing?
I guess I’m trying to get a complete picture here of what the world is like to Tinkerbell (give or take the flying part). I can picture isolated fragments, but am unable to wrap my mind around the totality of it. Can anybody help?