By Richie, Grade 7

So the theory is that in reality Ant man could destroy the world just for trying to save his little daughter. Scott Lang has the ability to shrink and increase in size. This is explained by the use of Pym-particles – a rare group of subatomic particles that shrink or increase the distance between atoms, or the distance between parts of the atom. Now you might be thinking that’s impossible, but scientifically, everything around you is made of atoms. Atoms are mostly made of empty space: for example, the hydrogen atom is roughly 99.99999999996% empty! Imagine if you were to squeeze all of the space from the atom in the human body, you could fit the particles of the entire human raise inside of a sugar cube! All of human kind’s particles could exist in a volume that small. Sweet! Literally.

Which obviously begs the question if we are completely made of empty space, then how can’t your hand go through the computer screen? Have you tried it now that you know the truth? Seriously try it, reach out and touch the screen if you just got to believe.

Just kidding. Sorry if any of you broke your computer now. But do you know that when you’re touching the computer screen you weren’t actually touching it? That the chair you’re sitting on you’re not touching? You’re hovering on top of the electrons from the chair. These are repelling the electrons of your body: they are negative charges, repelling each other.

In theory, Pym-particles could increase and decrease the size of atoms. The movie Ant Man states that the particles only change the distance between atoms, they don’t actually change the number of atoms.

What that means is even when the object changes size, their mass would still be the same, meaning the quantity of matter the object, so if Scott’s mass stays the same but his volume is shrinking or expanding, what’s changing is his density. Density= mass/volume, and messing with this completely changes all the events that you see in the movie, including the theory of Scott, being able to destroy the planet! To recap: the Pym-particles can change any object into any size. The two scenes that show this are the giant ant and the giant Thomas the Tank Engine toy. These moments are unexpected and hilarious! It’s a kind of humor I haven’t seen for quite a long time, but in real life, these physics could make them even more ridiculous.

On average, ants usually tend to be as heavy as 3mg but the pym particles now expand those 3mg of mass to a volume the size of a human, which is about 66.4 liters if you use the method (D=M/V). This means the density of the ant would be around D=0.05mg per liter. What does that mean? Well, the density of air is 1,200 mg per liter! That giant ant is now lighter than air; it would literally float away like a giant creepy ant balloon! The same like the giant Thomas the train – forget about it destroying the house, it would literally just bounce away like a bouncy castle caught in a breeze.

So let’s say Scott is around 200 pounds of muscle: there’s absolutely no way ant-Tony or any of the ants would be able to support that kind of weight: they would just get squished by a tiny man, and die. If Scott punches a guy in ant-form it could feel like getting stabbed by a knife, and if he ran and jumped at someone he could function just like a bullet. But we’re not even close to Scott’s true power. Now we’re reaching insanity…

Remember, at the end of the movie Scott must turn off his suit’s regulator (a device that protects him from him turning too small) in order to destroy the molecules of the “yellowjacket” super suit. In doing this he could create a black hole! Any amount of mass could be a black hole if it becomes dense enough: this is called the Schwarzschild radius. Basically, this is a radius of a sphere is if all mass of an object were compressed within that sphere. The escape velocity from it would be equal to the speed of light: everything within this radius would become a black hole.

So I did the calculation and, assuming Scott’s weight is around 200 pounds and he has a mass of 90 kg, he would have enough density to become a black hole if he shrank into the radius of 0.000000000000000000000013 millimeters! Which is tiny! In the film Scott turns down his uit safety switch and he shrinks down quickly passing through cells and molecules. We then see him shrink to the size of an atom, even then he is not small enough, but he keeps going…he even gets smaller than quarks – which are particles we haven’t even properly identified.

Scott at this point is really, really small – as small as 10/-32mm, which according to his mass is enough to make a black hole. And this is not a tiny black hole that will just disappear into thin air; this would in fact be a very viable black hole, a black hole’s decay by a process called as Hawking Radiation the more mass the black hole has the longer it can stay viable, and start sucking in mass to grow. A black hole could stay viable with at least .00002 grams – but remember we have nearly 200 pounds of muscle for the black hole to feed on! Eventually it would grow big enough to suck in the earth as we know it. The brutal irony is, that in order to save his little daughter, Ant Man could kill everyone. But hey, that’s just a theory…