Oh, hey! We have something cool to show you today. Some company called “Szalinski Labs”
or something was having a going out of business sale, and we thought this laser-y thing would
be cool for the show.
Is it plugged in?
"Powering up!"
This is going to be cool.
You made sure it wasn't turned on, right?
ZAP!
Popcorn's ready! Dr. Hanson?
Um. I think I’ve been shrunk. Or is it shrank? This isn’t good. Ok, let’s figure this
out like a scientist. Think. Observe.
Actually it's really hard to see. Everything is so dark. Which makes sense: my irises are
super super tiny, not letting in a lot of light. But who needs to see, right?!
Hey! What just happened?
What?! Hold on…
They can’t hear me. And I can’t seem to hear them either.
I can explain this! A full-sized ear responds to frequencies between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz,
because of how the hair cells in our cochlea vibrate. Full-sized human voices fall between
85 and 255 Hz, but my inner ear is so small, I can’t hear anything less than maybe four
or five hundred hertz.
And even if my tiny lungs could move enough air for an audible sound wave, my itty bitty
vocal cords must be ringing at 20 kHz or higher. If only there was a dog around.
I am cold. Really cold.
Well, I'm about a hundred times shorter, which means I’ve got about ten thousand times
less surface area, and a million times less volume to make body heat.
I'll have to eat like a hummingbird just to keep from freezing to death. I wonder where that
popcorn went?
Come to think of it, I don't know why I’m still conscious. The hemoglobin in my blood
must be smaller than the oxygen molecules it needs to carry to keep me alive. I’m
sure there’s a perfectly good explan…
That Szalinski machine should be illegal. Actually, I’m pretty sure I just broke several
laws of physics.
Shrinking someone shouldn’t be possible. If that beam were capable of destroying atomic
matter, it would have looked more like this.
But what if it removed the empty space in my atoms?
The nucleus holds more than 99% of an atom’s mass, but it’s 100,000 times smaller than
an atom is wide. In other words, if an atom was the size of the Big Apple, the nucleus
would be just an apple.
Problem is, this isn’t how atoms really work.
Electrons aren’t exactly anywhere. At any moment, we can’t predict for certain where
one will be orbiting. If we go looking for it, quantum mechanics says there’s a high
probability the electron will be orbiting here compared to, say, here, but there’s
some chance it could be anywhere.
Imagine a spinning fan. We know there are 4 blades in there, but we can’t say exactly
where they are. But if you put your hand inside, you’re definitely going to find one.
An electron’s orbit is a cloud of places it could be, and an atom’s empty space isn’t
really “empty” the way we normally think of it. That’s the weirdness of quantum probability,
We also can’t shrink me just by pushing my atoms closer together. That would violate
the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Our cloud view of electrons only tells us where we’ll probably
find them, but if we push two atoms closer together without bonding them, the higher
the probability that two of their electrons would be found in the same quantum state,
and in this universe that’s just not allowed.
We could add energy and move electrons to higher cloud orbitals all on their own, but
that would take pressures approaching the inside of a planet or a star. Not good for
your health.
Atoms are the size they are because of the rules of the universe, and since we’re made
of atoms, that goes for us too. But that doesn’t explain what happened earlier.
For now, let’s just keep today’s experiment between us, ok?
Stay curious.
[SAD MUSIC]