- Would Ant-Man's worst enemy actually
be this simple magnifying glass.
Let's get technical.
(intense orchestral music)
Ant-Man was one of the founders
of the Avengers in the comics,
and now as part of the MCU,
has been a part of some
of the largest skirmishes across the universe,
but as far as I can tell, he has never had
to face off against one of these.
Aside from helping Grandma Reed and Sherlock find clues,
you probably know that a magnifying glass
can concentrate the sun's power to burn stuff.
And if you too were once a child filled with regret,
you know that it can burn ants,
but would the same thing happen to Ant-Man?
(upbeat electronic music)
(blows on flames)
(chuckles) Woozy.
First of all, how do magnifying glasses magnify stuff?
The magnifying glasses that you are most familiar with
are just convex lenses, lenses with this shape, on a stick,
and what those lenses do is bend, or refract light,
as the light passes through it,
and the light interacts with the glass.
For example, these parallel rays of light get bent
and then focus into the focal point of this lens.
This bending, this refraction, is what allows
for magnifying glass magnification.
For example, here is a diagram of some rays
of light coming form a small object in front
of our magnifying glass and in front of the focal point
on the other side of the magnifying glass.
You can see here we still have parallel lines of light
that get bent through the lens
and down through our focal point on our side,
and you have a line of light coming through here
through the center of the lens,
and it gets bent one way,
but then equally back the other way,
so nothing really happens to it.
Now, if I was an observer looking
through this magnifying glass at this object,
what would I really see?
When we see light, our brains have evolved to assume
that that light is traveling to us in straight lines even
if that's not really what happened
if there were some weird physics going on.
And so, when we look through a magnifying glass,
what we see is not the actual image of the object,
but rather, a virtual image that our brain creates,
assuming that the light coming to us
is from straight lines of light and nothing bent.
We assume that the light that we are seeing must
be coming from a bigger object,
and so we see a bigger object.
Now, you are never gonna get this close
to something like the sun with a magnifying glass
here or else, you know, (flame whooshes) you'd be on fire,
but distance is why a magnifying glass can create fire.
(flames roar)
If you could somehow travel right up to the surface
of the sun and then chart all the paths
that all the photons of light shooting out
of the sun were taking, you would see photons
of light shooting out every which way in every direction,
but when they get to earth,
these rays of light appear more or less parallel.
Why?
If the earth was right next to the sun,
yes, it would be on fire, but also the rays
of light hitting the earth from the sun
could differ by very large angles.
But we're not right next to the sun.
We're a full eight light minutes away.
A 150 million kilometers.
So even if those lines of light originate
across the surface of the sun,
because of this immense distance,
because we are such a tiny target relative to the sun,
when those lines of light get to us,
they start to look more and more parallel.
This cosmic happenstance is why on earth we
are able to nicely focus sunlight
down to a tiny point with our magnifying glasses.
If we were closer to the sun with less parallel light
that doesn't nicely go through our focus,
then it wouldn't work as well,
and (fire roars) we'd be on fire again.
When basically parallel rays of light come down from the sun
and pass through our magnifying glass,
they are focused down, not to a small, single point,
but to a tiny image of the sun,
so now we are getting technical.
How hot can this image of the sun get?
Well, let's go inside and find out.
(groans) If you somehow found yourself in the focal point
of a magnifying glass, that tiny image of the sun
would now appear as a huge sun in your sky,
as if the sun was now closer to you and to the earth
because more sunlight is now hitting you
than otherwise would.
The intensity therefore, the power per unit area
inside of the focal point
of a magnifying glass increases dramatic, dramatically.
The hottest it could get in here then
is if we had a perfectly built lens
that somehow focused light, such that no matter
what direction I look, not just up,
I would see a giant image of the sun.
All directions pointed back to the sun.
And think about that for a second.
The only other place I can get that kind of view
is if I was in the surface of the sun.
The hottest the focus of a magnifying glass
can get, therefore, is the temperature
of the source of the light.
In our case, the sun and its surface, which is hotter
than the melting point of any known material.
This property of magnifying glass focal points is also
why, for example, you can not focus moonlight
down to a point hot enough to burn stuff.
The moon just isn't hot enough.
(buzzing)
Even if your magnifying glass can't create surface
of the sun temperatures, it can still certainly get hot
enough to burn stuff in its focus.
So now, what about Ant-Man?
Let's set up our question.
If Ant-Man literally shrunk down to the size
of an actual ant, could you vaporize him completely
with your run of the mill magnifying glass
like you may have done when you were a kid
with actual ants, but now you're filled with regret,
and you wish that your moral reasoning skills
were as developed as your curiosity at the time.
(gasps for breath) Well, grab a ruler,
and your magnifying glass.
We're headed to earth.
What is the power of your average magnifying glass?
Well, I have an average magnifying glass right here.
It is small, cheap, you can buy it just about anywhere.
Sunlight, which this magnifying glass has to concentrate,
after it travels from the sun, through our atmosphere,
down to the surface of our planet,
has a power of about a 1,000 watts for every square meter.
So to know how strong this is gonna be
in terms of burning, we need to know how much
this lens is going to concentrate those 1,000 watts.
So now, we need to measure the area of this lens,
the area of the tiny image of the sun that it creates,
and also, the focal length.
I measure the focal length of the magnifying glass
and use this equation to get an area for the image
of the sun that it makes, and the circle symbol there
is just the angular diameter of the sun from earth.
I then measure the area of the magnifying glass
to be about 54 square centimeters.
When you divide these two areas,
you get our concentration factor,
which for this specific magnifying glass, is 1,560.
Over 1,500 times the intensity of normal sunlight.
So, inside our focus, the intensity of sunlight goes
from a kilowatt per unit area
to over a megawatt in the same space.
If the conditions out here were perfect,
we could theoretically get the focus
of this magnifying glass up to hot enough to boil lead.
We do not have perfect conditions,
but we can still burn stuff.
And remember, there isn't actually any power increase
here with the magnifying glass.
What we were doing is just taking more sunlight
and focusing it down into a small space.
It's kinda like the difference between stepping
on a bed of nails and just a single nail.
One is a lot more intense even though the force
from your foot is the same.
We can still, though, burn paper and other material
with this magnifying glass,
which means we're reaching temperatures
of at least 500 kelvin, or 440 degrees Fahrenheit.
The question now is would Ant-Man suffer the same fate?
That depends on exactly how Scott Lang's suit works
and a whole bunch of ant math.
For our hypothetical, we are going to assume
that Scott Lang shrinks down
to the size of your average ant,
and then we bring the focus of our magnifying glass
down on top of him.
What happens next?
Well, there are actually heat equations
that can give us some idea.
We want a complete defeat and vaporization of Lang,
so here we can start to rearrange this heat energy equation
to get the time it would take to do so.
If it's a few seconds,
then it's probably an effective weapon.
If it takes longer than that, probably not.
The total heat energy Q needed
to raise Scott Lang's temperature enough to vaporize him
can also be thought of power times time.
So we can rearrange this equation to solve for time.
So now all we have to do is assume some masses
for Scott Lang when he's ant size,
get the intensity that we measured
from our magnifying glass,
and then figure out how much power
is actually hitting Ant-Man's scaled down surface area.
Do all of this math, and you get the time it
would take to vaporize Ant-Man
using our actual magnifying glass
that we just measured and evaluated,
and I get 3.3 seconds.
In just seconds, Ant-Man would vaporize and be no more.
And this time value is even confirmed by experiment
if, you know, you were ever a kid and you spent a lot
of time, you know, burning ants and
they were (mumbles) - Why Kyle?
Why did you do this to us?
How could you do this to me and my family?
- I was just a boy I didn't know
(overlapping voices)
- Whoa.
I almost didn't make it out of that one.
I know that we just said that you could defeat Ant-Man
in just a few seconds with a magnifying glass,
but that cannot be our full conclusion
because Ant-Man's powers are weird.
It flip flops in the movies, but it is often implied
that when tiny, Scott Lang keeps his mass.
In other words, he wouldn't go down
to a few milligrams at ant size.
He would keep his many dozens of kilograms instead
and be literally millions of times more massive.
If we keep everything else the same,
but now assume that somehow, when small,
Ant-Man keeps his man mass,
the time it would take to vaporize him goes to 4.1.
Years.
With any kind of heat loss from the suit,
which he would need if he was always shrinking
and enlarging, this immense time values means
that basically, this won't happen.
There could be some damage from a magnifying glass,
but certainly, no defeat.
Even if Ant-Man had just a few milligrams of mass
when tiny, there is still a fairly simple way
around (overlapping voices) death by magnifying glass.
Leave me alone! - How could you do this to us?
- The focal point of a magnifying glass
is very focused, duh, and so Ant-Man,
just outside of the focus, would be fine.
Even if he couldn't move, all he would have to do
is shrink or enlarge himself a little bit
and it would be outside of the focal point
and seriously minimize the intensity of it.
For example, the focus
of this definitely scary two square meter lens
is at over half the temperature of the surface of the sun,
and yet you can get very close to it
with nothing bad happening to you.
Inside of the focus, sure, instant fire,
but out side of the focus, you're fine.
Ant-Man could avoid defeat in this way with a simple shrink.
So, could the humble magnifying glass defeat Ant-Man.
Well, it depends on exactly how his powers are working
from moment to moment, but there
is a plausible interpretation where
if he keeps his man mass at small sizes,
no, you could not vaporize him
like an ant underneath the focus.
Of course, you could come up with some elaborate set up
and trap him and put a huge lens over top of him
and put a gigajoules worth of energy
into his body in a few seconds,
but at this point, this is extremely complicated,
and you're like a super villain now,
and there are simpler ways to go about it.
The magnifying glass was supposed to be simple.
At the very least, we did get to shine some light
on a pretty fun question.
(In a higher pitch) Because science (screams).
You did it.
(upbeat electronic music)
Keep in mind we're evaluating this scenario
in a very straight foreword, brute force kind of way.
We're assuming Ant-Man to be like a barrel.
Like a 70 kilogram barrel of water.
Just water.
So, if you think about it,
if you held our smallish magnifying glass
at that barrel of water, you have an intuitive idea
that it would never fully vaporize the full barrel of water.
It would lose heat.
It just wouldn't get hot enough, fast enough,
but if you had just a tiny tiny, a single drop of water,
like would be in an ant,
for example, you can imagine
that it would burn it up a lot faster,
so that's what we're getting at.
We assumed everything was water,
and what would it do to a water person.
And, if it had even a larger capacity,
being flesh and bone and everything,
it would take even longer, so either way,
if Ant-Man's powers work in this kinda weird way,
I don't think you could magnify him.
But, don't count him out cause his effect
on the MCU is magnif-- (sighs).
Thank you so much for watching, Alexandra,
and thank you to Dan Casey for suggesting this episode.
If you want more of me, or us, you can suggest ideas
and follow all of our nerdy whatever we're doing
(chuckles) at these social media handles here,
and the first few episodes of Because Space
are live on the Because Science channel with Dr. Moo.
You're gonna want to check them out.
We got celebrity guests.
Oh we got fun topics.
We got it all.
Please go and share your comments there.
You thought I was gonna say bye, didn't you?
I didn't.
(electronic music)