It has almost no inertia. As you note, it has very small mass, and it’s moving very slowly. So if m is small and v is small, m*v is going to be really really small.
And…really, really cute!
Not all natural phenomena scale in direct proportion to one another - if an ant were scaled up magically to human size, it wouldn’t even be able to lift its own body off the ground.
Take an idealised cubic container - scale it up in every way so that it’s twice the size - that is, twice as wide across as before - if your grow-ray is working properly, the container’s wall thickness is also now doubled. but the contained volume is eight times what it was previously.
Keep doing that and obviously, you quickly reach a point where the walls lack the structural strength to contain the contents, or even to support their own weight.
This sort of thing happens in many different ways - it’s the reason that surface tension can pull a raindrop into a spherical shape, but not a whole bucketful of water. It’s the reason ants can carry many multiples of their own body weight, but humans or elephants can’t.
Well, they don’t have skulls, but they do have tiny little brains in their tiny little heads.
PROFIT!
I don’t think a regular house ant is anywhere close to 1/20th of an ounce. A weight of .25 milligrams would be closer to the mark.
Still. The example is illustrative; scaling up the linear (one-dimensional) speed may not apply when you also have to scale up the (three-dimensional) mass.
Point taken.
Didn’t that already happen?
Once.
Isn’t this happening?