Big ego, I'll show you a big ego.
I kind of walked right into that one didn't I? And a taco truck.
Damn. What a waste of tacos. [Deadpool: Hey! That's my line!]
[Intro Song]
Hello Internet, welcome to Film Theory
the show that puts out new episodes only slightly more often than Marvel puts out new superhero movies.
I mean, seriously, it feels like Infinity War just happened [ikr?]
but it's already time to put that one behind us to focus on a story with some smaller stakes.
You might have noticed that Scott Lang aka the Ant-Man was
absent from the latest Avengers movie. [Really? I didn't realize]
And that's not a case of him being tucked away in some microscopic hiding place.
Believe me, I checked. Every promotional poster out there. [Along with emptying every can of Diet Coke in the house]
And I found some weird things by doing that too.
Like this. And this.
Ooh, there's a hidden Mickey, that Illuminati symbol wasn't all that surprising, considering it's Disney
But yeah, no Ant-Man as far as the eye could see.
All we hear in the movie is that he and Hawkeye, quote "took a deal"
since being a hero was too hard on their families.
Aww, being a superhero is hard, is it?
Boohoo. Now half the universe is dead. [SPOILER ALERT]
Not like that's gonna be a lot easier on the fam.
Anyways, in case you've forgotten, Ant-Man has the ability to shrink down to ant size using what's known as Pym Particles
the marvelous marvel-ous
Get it? [Yes, we get it]
Miracle matter that can mess with the size, mass, and density of any substance.
We most often see him using the power of the Pym Particle to shrink himself down to the size of an ant. [Hence the name: Ant-Man]
However, one of the most most memorable Ant-Man scenes from the MCU
has to be him doing the reverse.
In Captain American, Captain American - the Korean ripoff version of Captain America.
In Captain America Civil War, he blows himself up to massive size becoming the most powerful hero on the battlefield [So I guess Vision doesn't exist]
Throwing trucks around, taking missiles to the chest -
basically turning unstoppable until Spider-Man decides to take a page from
Luke Skywalker's playbook and ties up his legs to trip him like an AT-AT that forgot how to walk.
[Spider-Man:] You know that part
on that snow planet, with the walking thingies.
[Mat-Pat:] I'm calling BS here, by the way. It is the most unbelievable part of the movie
Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the MCU.
Peter Parker clearly would know what all of those things are named. #NotMyNerd
Anyway, it makes you wonder why doesn't Ant-Man use this power more often.
[Ant-Man:] I do it all the time.
[Mat-Pat:] Really? Because this is the first time we've ever seen you do it in the movie.
[Ant-Man:] Once. In a lab.
[Mat-Pat:] All right. So at first this might seem like a lazy cop-out by the writers, [Ya think?]
But when you look at the real-life science
It actually makes sense.
Being big doesn't just take a fictional subatomic Pym Particle - a power like this is gonna have some weird
side effects to Scott's body. As it turns out that there's an extreme cost for being big - and that's the lesson for today.
How being bigger isn't always
being better and considering it's a power he's gonna be using again in a second movie, "Ant-Man and the Wasp"
Learning the oddities that come with being big is gonna be essential so that he doesn't end every fight, hangry.
[Ant-Man:] Does anyone have any orange slices?
[Mat-Pat]: Have you ever stopped to wonder why an elephant is less agile than a mouse? [No Mat, I can't say I have]
I mean sure we all intuitively know that big things tend to move slower
But why? You might say that it's because they weigh more and yeah, that's certainly true
But consider this: if you took a mouse and blew it up
wouldn't it retain the same abilities that allow it to scamper around?
Or by the same token if you take Scott Lang, an athletic superhero and
do the equivalent of dropping him into Photoshop to stretch the corner of his transform box
wouldn't he just have the same abilities but bigger and stronger than before? He's still the same
proportions after all. I mean sure he may be gaining more mass
But at the same time, his muscles are also growing and gaining strength
including all of those fast twitch muscle fibers that humans use when they sprint.
So why is it so much harder for mega Scott to
perform basic actions when he's big in these fight scenes well, believe it or not
But the answer is actually a universal law of mathematics [Shock] that applies to all matter in the universe
Man between this and the last ant-man theory about how he would be able to create black holes
Ant-man seems to be the key to unlocking the secrets of existence. Maybe that's why he's not in infinity war
He's too op. This secret universal law is known as the square-cube law
all the way back to Galileo [No no no no no no no] in
1638 yeah
The same Galileo who discovered Saturn's rings the moons of Jupiter and taught the world that planets orbit around the Sun
Meanwhile Here I am rewatching civil wars Airport scene covered in cheeto dust
Galileo: making the rest of the world feel like a slacker since
1640 anyway teaching people that they weren't the center of the universe didn't make him very popular with the Roman Inquisition
Or Twitter quite frankly resulting in him getting put under house arrest
And since he didn't have access to candy crush or cutthroat kitchen [Or Full House] reruns it gave him a whole lot of time to do math
Math that led to yet another discovery that makes us all feel like underachievers the square-cube law aka
Exactly what we need to analyze Ant -Man [Big surprise] the easiest way to explain the law is this imagine a tesseract
that's one inch by one inch by one inch it has a surface area of six square inches because each face has an area of
One square inch and there are six phases the volume is 1 times 1 times 1 or 1 cubic inch great
If only AP calc exams were this easy [Tell me about it] now suppose that we double each dimension of the tesseract making it 2 by 2 by 2
Surface areas now 24 square inches and volume is now 8 cubic inches our surface area increased by a factor of 4
But the volume increased by a factor of 8 now look at this
We doubled the size of the tesseract right meaning that we multiplied everything by 2
But the surface area increased by 2 squared or 4 and the volume increased by 2
Cubed or 8 if we had tripled the size of everything from our 1 by 1 by 1
Tesseract surface area would now be 54 and volume 27 surface area would have increased by a factor of 9 or 3
squared and volume by a factor of
27 or 3 cubed in other words by increasing the dimension by a given factor
the surface area will increase by the square of that factor and the volume will increase by the
Cube of that factor. That is the square cube law in a nutshell [I think I got it, but just in case.. Tell me the whole thing again I wasn't listening]
Congratulations, you made it through all the math for today's episode
Here's a chocolate [After the Willy Wonka episode, I ain't touching that] and an achievement and a thousand points added to your theorists score
Make sure you keep that one in a safe place now, then what's the significance of all those?
darn Tesseracts to Ant Man and his gigantism
well, as Ant-Man grows other properties are gonna change as well specifically his mass is gonna increase in the same way that his volume does
It'll be the cube of whatever factor he increases by
so if he scales up by five his mass is
multiplied by five cubed or a hundred and twenty five times and that's cool and all but there's a big
Problem here strength only scales with area when you want to figure out how strong a bone is
You don't look at how long it is or how much volume it has you only care about how thick it is
You care about its cross-sectional
area the same applies to muscle strength
So at five times the size and a hundred and twenty five times the weight ant-man strength is only gonna multiply by 25
The TL;DR of all this when you make something bigger
You're not actually making it stronger by the same amount the more you scale something up
It becomes relatively less and less strong for an example of this in nature
Just look at deer white-tailed deer are a hundred and fifty pounds while elk are six
Hundred pounds just by looking at them. You can tell that the Elks legs are much thicker than the lighter white-tailed deer legs
This is because an Elks bones and muscles need to be much thicker to support the extra weight
But even in spite of all that extra girth elk are still more likely to break their bones. The long story short here is
Supporting additional mass is hard it is
biologically very
Difficult, it requires a lot of extra internal infrastructure in your body
Infrastructure that humans and Ant-Man specifically just aren't built for [Aww] so let's take one more
Look at ant-man if we figure out the factor of increased for Ant-Man size
We can quickly assess how that would affect his mass and strength now in the trailers for the new movie
We hear him bragging about how big he's able to get. "How big did you get?" "Twenty-one feet, you?"
"65 feet" "Sixty-five?" the actor who plays ant-man Paul Rudd is reportedly 5 foot 10 inches
Meeting that Ant-Man has to be able to scale up to a maximum of 11 times his normal body size
Now remember the square-cube law his mass and volume will increase by a cube of that factor of increase
so his resulting mass is going to increase by a factor of 11 times 11 times 11, or
1331. Websites say that Rudd weighs in at about 171 pounds or 78 kilos
So in giant form, he's actually gonna be weighing in at a "modest"
220
7601 pounds or 100
3800 18 kilograms. That's the same as 15 elephants or about one space shuttle
however, the cross sectional area of his muscles and bones will only increase by the square of 11 [So.. square shaped Eggos?] or
121 getting over a hundred times stronger might seem like a lot but it means almost nothing when you consider that he's over a
Thousand times heavier than he was which explains why Ant Man who's normally an agile
Superhero capable of all kinds of acrobatic feats is reduced to a slow-moving behemoth in civil war
Honestly considering how much additional weight his legs are carrying
It's a wonder that he's even able to be standing at all which begs the question or for all of you on reddit
Who are bothered by that idiomatic usage of the phrase raises the question, could he actually stand?
Well, it took a bit of digging but I found out bones are much better at handling compressive forces than shear forces
This is because bones are made up of columns of collagen and calcium phosphate [Wut?] like bundles of twigs
and because they run vertically through the bone they give the bone strength through its leg to show you just how big of a difference
all this makes it takes about
4,000 Newton's of force to fracture your femur when you hit it this way a shear direction, but
50,000 Newton's of force when you apply the force this way a
Compressive force over ten times more force required that's according to the e study guide for physics, by the way
It was a hard number to find anyway at normal human size. It would mean that Scott Lang would need to weigh over
11,000 240 pounds to break his legs. No big worries there or for the rest of humanity no matter how many cheeseburgers we eat [Oh, how I hate America]
But then like Mario jump man on his shrooms
We Gigantify it his leg strength scales by 121 meaning that he can now support around 1 million
360 thousand forty pounds on his legs and considering he weighs in at just under 230 pounds when he's in large scale
He is well in the clear someone get that man an orange slice. He deserves it
But what's coolest about all of this, is that well, yes
It explains why he has to be slow in careful in his mega form
it also explains how he's so incredibly powerful in his micro form because you see all of this also works in Reverse if
increasing your size
Increases the ratio of mass to strength then
Decreasing your muscle mass should have the opposite effect more strength relative to your size
According to the Marvel website ant-man can shrink himself down to half an inch
That's him scaling himself down a hundred and forty two times
Which means that his bone and muscle cross section will be shrunk down by a hundred and forty two
Squared but his volume and mass will be shrunk down by a hundred and forty two cubed
That means that when ant-man is half an inch tall his strength ratio increases by a factor of a hundred and forty two
That's the equivalent of a six-foot man feeling like they only weigh 1.4 pounds
Imagine what kind of athletic feats your body would be capable of if you gained that factor of strength
You could lift things that were way bigger than you [And not as lame as a fridge]
in fact
That's exactly what we observe in the animal kingdom [In Disney World?]
Ants are capable of lifting objects that are hundreds of times their own weight while elephants are only capable of lifting
Objects that are around one tenth of their weight true in absolute terms. The elephant might be capable of lifting bigger objects, but
Proportionally the ant seems so much stronger and that's a big part of where Ant-Man's powers come from for example
He has the ability to change size at will while maintaining his momentum meaning
He starts an incredible sprint while small and blows himself up to deliver a devastating punch. I always hear the phrase
That bigger is better [I mean, it was in HSM 3]
but as we saw in civil war being big has its costs while ant man's
Gigantic form might be one of the most visually impressive things we see him do in the movies his real strength lies
Not in his ability to grow but his ability to shrink Scott Lang proves that it's not the size of your superhero
But rather the size of their power ratio "If you two are finished comparing sizes"
"65" well, the science proves it at least Scott still seems really proud of that 65 footer
But hey, that's just a theory a film
Theory and if you missed my last Ant-Man theory on why is technically the most devastating character in the Marvel MCU [The Marvel Marvel Cinematic Unerverse? God, it's Detective Comics Comics all over again]
It's right here
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