Just got finished watching Fantastic Voyage, and in the movie they use a wireless set to communicate with the “outside” world. These days, what would be the best method for the mini-sub to talk to mission control while inside the patient?
Aren’t their parts in the chips that are only a few atoms across already? If you were shrunk down to the size of a blood cell, and your phone shrunk at the same scale, then the chips could not exist.
I think shrinking the phone would adversely affect the battery capacity.
If you’re shrunk, though, wouldn’t the distances between your molecules be merely compacted? IOW, your molecules don’t shrink, the distance between them becomes closer. Like Ray Palmer, the Atom from the comics.
It would certainly depend on how the shrinking happens. In Asimov’s novelization (which probably includes a lot more detail than the movie), it’s done by editing the values of some of the fundamental constants of nature, which causes everything to shrink, right down to the level of the atoms and below. In this case, the internals of the cell phone should still work fine. Even there, though, you’re going to need to customize them to communicate with the outside world, because they’ll be tuned to different frequencies (this is largely governed by the size of the antenna and other components).
Hard to say. For instance, there may be issues of friction or inertia or adhesion that wouldn’t necessarily scale down linearly. Who’s to know whether mini-you could even use the keypad?
IIRC Asimov wrote some stuff about the mass going into hyperspace (remember you’d have several tons of mass inside the body). It was just a novelization, not something he came up on his own. The movie didn’t even try to explain it.
I can see a problem with this. You’d retain all your mass, and become extremely dense.
Anything you were standing on, the wall of an artery for instance, would be under great pressure. Most likely you’d just ‘drill’ your way out of the patient.
I remember it as being a very unsatisfying explanation in the book where the exposition dude explains there are two options: compress everything which would require levels of pressure unattainable on earth, or remove material so that by the time a man is the size of a mouse, he has the brain power to match. Miniaturization was different. Miniaturization just shrank everything which didn’t actually answer any questions.
If I’m not mistaken, cell phone antennae have very specific geometries. Shrink the antenna and you mess up transmission and reception. And as been mentioned upthread, the limitations of reducing the size of microchips have recently moved from not being able to create tiny structures to tiny structures not having the same properties if you shrink them further. Also, with resistance of a metal conductor being proportional to length and the inverse of area, resistance would go down in a conductor shrunk evenly along all spacial dimensions, and you’ll most likely fry some part of it before you ran out of power in the now tiny battery.
Basically, there is no scientifically plausible way to make the miniaturization in Fantastic Voyage work. The movie didn’t even try to explain it. Asimov threw in some gobbledygook in his novelization which he admitted later was nonsense. (And, incidentally, Asimov was paid poorly for the novelization. He only got $5,000 for it, which even in 1965 was somewhat small for an Asimov book. It was nothing but a fast way to earn a little money for him.) The problem isn’t that your cell phone wouldn’t work if you were miniaturized. The problem is that science wouldn’t work if you were miniaturized.
This is all great information! So what WOULD be the best way for the tiny sub to communicate?
As Wendell Wagner says: "The problem is that science wouldn’t work if you were miniaturized. "
So the answer is - any way you like. It is simply up to your script writer to come up with some appropriate goobledygook. Radio, ultrasound, ESP, wormholes, hyperspace. Whatever you want. Mostly limited by the demands of the story line.
They even violated their own within-movie rules by leaving the sub inside the guy’s body. Where the crushed pieces should then have reverted to normal size at the time limit, shredding the patient!
If I were writing a new version, I would have everyone wear suits that conduct a “subspace field” completely around the person. Inside the suit, and inside the sub, is “normal space” - laws of mass, inertia, friction, speed of light etc behave just as in the full size universe. But to an outside observer, the suit becomes very light, so the person can function inside a body without falling through (they’d probably fall all the way through the patient, the table, the floor, and 2 miles of planet surface, because 200 lbs of force over such a tiny area would cut through nearly anything!). I’d double talk the subspace field properties so that the apparent weight of the person in the suit can be varied, giving just enough mass to do the job.
As for communications, ideally I’d have no two-way communication. Puts all the responsibility on the team, increases dramatic tension. Communications between them should be possible because they are all subject to the same shrinkage effects. Inside the sub, you can have normal (dramatic!) conversations, but outside in the suits is just gestures and signs for communication between the people.
If the universe allowed it, I’d use psychic communications, like Deanna Troi or Lily the AT&T clerk. One could postulate that psychic communications have no boundaries and can make it past both the subspace field and the size differences. But we wouldn’t want to stretch credibility too far! This is Science!
There was a Deep Space Nine episode along those lines. I only saw it once.
Thank you, blue infinity. Now please go tell this to the people who made the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Drives me nuts.
Oh, my! I’m stealing ideas subconsciously!
In the original story (or the novelization), they got the white blood cell that ate the sub to follow them out the tear duct.
Transistors work on specific geometries also - I doubt any of them would work shrunk. Plus, since the speed of light won’t change when you are shrunk, the signals in the chip will be arriving at their destinations much more rapidly than planned for, and there will be a number of timing problems.
So the magic subspace field solution is probably the best. Solves all the problems at once.
Submarines use (at least use to) Very Low Frequency (VLF) radios w/ long cable antennas (trailing behind the sub).
A mathematician and/or and electrical engineer could figure out what that frequency would become when the sub & equipment are shrunk to a given size. Find or make a radio that works on that frequency.