So, I was just thinking about some the Marvel films and characters and I know I shouldn’t try to figure things out too much, as they are comic book characters, who work under the comic book laws… however.
Can someone explain how it works for when he is ant sized. Its said he has the proportionate strength of a normal sized man, but he’s just ant sized. So does that mean that if he hits you when he’s small it’ll feel like a normal sized man hitting you, only more centralized to a smaller point of impact? What about his weight? In the film, he is small and lands on a car hood from fairly high fall. He makes a tiny yet pronounced dent in the roof of the car. So, would it stand to reason then that when he was on the tip of Hawkeye’s arrow in Civil War, that it would have weighed down the arrow tip?
I know I have to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy it and I do that, but I’m just trying to understand the comic book science of it.
The whole mass/size thing in Ant-Man etc is ridiculously inconsistent. Sometimes he has the same mass but tiny size; sometimes he has proportionate mass to his size. It’s whatever the moment requires.
Agreed. Ant-Man doesn’t even really make sense within the rules of the universe they set up. But he is one of the most fun characters in the whole thing so I let it slide.
Thats kind of what I was thinking. It is inconsistant, in the films anyway, but yeah, we just got to let it slide. I agree, I love the character and I think he is fun to watch, but since it is inconsistant, I was thinking I was missing something in the explanation.
He can’t be too heavy, if an ant can carry him around.
DC’s Atom had that ability (science-based because his powers came from a fragment of a white dwarf star that he picked up and carried into his lab :p:cool:), but did Marvel’s shrinkers (also Wasp, YJ) explicitly have that power?
IIRC, the specific handwavium with Ant-Man is that he shifts most of his mass into another dimension. So I guess the technobabble explanation would be: imagine that he’s standing on stage, in front of a curtain, pressing down on the floorboards with the weight of a full-grown man before unspectacularly picking up a barbell with one hand, maybe punching a hole in some flimsy-but-not-too-flimsy stuff.
And now imagine he steps mostly behind the curtain – with most of his body weight pressing down on the floorboards back there, since only his hand is poking out in front of that curtain. Can that hand still pick up a barbell? Well, yeah. Can it still punch a hole in stuff? Sure. I mean, most of his mass has been shunted offstage, and he can rest his hand on a little onstage table exactly as if said hand didn’t weigh all that much; and you could even paint an Ant-Man costume on that hand before it impressively picks up a barbell, but that’s not actually as weird as it looks, is it?
Picture two full-sized men, one in a bright red costume and one in a bright yellow costume, standing on top of a child’s toy-table, throwing plastic model-trains at each other. Looks silly huh?
But when they shrink down to a half-inch in height, suddenly it’s some kind crazy action-movie scene or something.
I was wondering the exact same thing. Now, just because I don’t remember Ant-Man/Yellowjacket and the Wasp having that power doesn’t mean they don’t have it, but I cannot recall anyone ever explicitly saying that they did. Without re-watching the film, did they say he retains his strength, or his strength and mass. The former is as impossible as shrinking down to ant-size, or growing like the Hulk/Giant-Man. It’s comics, so impossible works. The latter just leads to all kinds of inconsistencies. I prefer the former.
In the Fantastic Four version of Ant Man they get into the properties of the Pym particle. Scott Lang is able to combine the shrink aspect of Ant Man with the strength aspect of Giant Man and give Dr. Doom a beat down.
Further on the topic of comic book science, I seem to recall DC’s Atom, who could render himself variably and arbitrarily small, shrinking smaller than an oxygen atom and lampshading the fact that he was still breathing.
Yes, it is wildly inconsistent. When he shrinks, he keeps his mass, but when he grows, shouldn’t he then also keep the same mass? When he’s a giant, he should be a cloud, or, if his body can’t actually separate, then he should be like a cotton ball or something very not-dense.
Just one of those “comic book science” things that needs to be accepted, but it would be nice to at least have a sense of what the rules are, otherwise you end up with deus ex machinas.
The closest to an explanation that we got in the movie was the scene where Hope says that she knocked Scott’s buddies out by trying to explain it to them.
Hank’s explanation of “it makes the spaces between the molecultes smaller” is BS, according to my University of Pidooma science degree. But it sounds plausible enough to lead people down the wrong path and Hank probably lies about the science reflexively considering how every single person he told about the suit tried to steal it from him.
IIRC, the comic-book explanation is that he grows by temporarily adding mass from another dimension – namely, the dimension where his mass goes when he shrinks. And since the properties of matter from that dimension are up for grabs right when they’re first declared, the idea is that – without an ongoing deus ex machina – the writers can deus ex machina away problems inherent to the premise.
So, yeah, he gets a little heavier and a lot stronger when he shoots up to giant size, instead of getting sidelined by the square-cube law at various multiples of his height; but no, he won’t just announce mid-story that the extradimensional matter pulses in the presence of a lie or lets him jump one minute back in time or whatever.
I liked the Atom, one of the earliest non-Superman comics I had. He would shrink himself down into sub-atomic worlds where he could not only continue to shrink, but also grow and be a giant in that world.
Real world physics don’t apply in the comic world, properties like size, mass, and strength have a different relationship with the physical world than we are used to. So do biological functions like breathing. I’m sure comic book super-heroes would feel strange in our world as well, Superman would find himself no longer able to fly faster than the speed of light to go back in time to save Lois Lane, not to mention all the people who could readily see that Clark Kent looks exactly like Superman wearing a pair of glasses.
I wish there WAS an Ant Man. He could make a decent living driving around to houses, shrinking down and mounting his faithful Ant Steed, and leading his creepy-crawly minions off my kitchen counter, off of my kitchen floor, and out of the pantry in the wet spring/hot summer.
They were hardly the first. In 1922, Ray Cummings wrote “The Girl in the Golden Atom” in which a scientist develops a microscope that can see within atoms, and spots a girl living in one. Said scientist then invents a potion to shrink himself down so he can go find the girl. Luckily, on several subatomic journeys, he manages to find the right atom every time.
(Quite a fun read, actually, except that the science is barking mad.)