How would the you experience the world at a different scale?

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?

All I can say is that I have had days just like that. Nothing is going right and the world seems imponderably large. Other days I feel like a giant Superman able to leap tall buildings. If I really were that small, I’d have a terrific fear of cats, dogs, hawks and just about everything. Imagine being confronted by a hungry rat. Survival would be tricky without adequate force multipliers.

You would get cold very easily. You would feel much sturdier, able to jump high higher and fall further comfortably. Your voice would be mouse-high and you would have a hard time hearing deep human voices. Things would seem more sticky, more viscous, and less like projectiles, so if you tried to skim a stone across the water, it would be noticeably difficult to get it to leave your hand, would slow down in the air, and would probably stick to the water as soon as it first hit.

Why would the speed of light seem ten times faster?

Because you’re ten times smaller, and your perception of distances is skewed proportionate to that - pick any distance you think that light could cover, and it would look like light covered it in one tenth the time to the miniature guy standing there with the stopwatch. Or put succinctly, because 299,792,458 m/s is 2,997,924,580 dm/s.

The thing I have wondered about is the opposite – what it would feel like to be the size of a blue whale. When you see footage of large whales, everything they do seems to be in slow motion – because it just takes a long time to move that much mass that distance. (And I guess because they’re mostly moving in water, which is a denser medium.) It seems like it would feel strange to be living in slow motion… but I guess it would just seem normal. If mice could think, it would probably seem to them like we move in slow motion.

I remember reading that scientists created an extremely small model of a petrol-powered car, and that they discovered the petrol reaction functions very differently at that level. In fact I think they couldn’t get it to start using the same design as cars have at normal scale.

That is the premise of the recent book “Micro” by Michael Crichton (incomplete at his death, finished by Richard Preston). I’ll defer to others as to how realistic the physics was but one thing he had was the small humans had trouble breaking the surface tension of water.

Earlier short story by James Blish- Surface Tension.

Chapter 21, “Size and Shape” of Ever Since Darwin (1977) by Stephen J. Gould covers this topic. See especially p. 173-4.

I haven’t read that one - is there anything of particular interest in there, that hasn’t been mentioned yet?

Yes, and it can be gleaned at google books or at Amazon - search inside this book is enabled. The chapter is 7 pages long.

Gravity is weak to the insect, wind resistance is high due to the greater ratio of surface area to volume and surface adhesion matters a great deal.