Warning: This article may contain mild spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Marvel's latest movie installment, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, has quickly grown to Giant-Man status at the box office, but the bonkers joyride it gave moviegoers shrunk from reality and shriveled past the most basic principles of quantum physics.
Early on in the flick, the itty bitty superhero Scott Lang finds himself and his family slurped via a portal into the mystifying “Quantum Realm.” It's a subatomic dimension where he battles with the menacing time-traveling warlord Kang the Conqueror.
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Right there, at that point of entry into the “Quantum Realm,” everyone should’ve probably died somewhat agonizing deaths rather quickly, per the most basic laws of physics. But the film's CGI-enhanced reality-bending distortions extend far beyond that.
“I know the words that they use, [but the movie] has nothing to do with real quantum physics,” quipped Chris Ferrie, a quantum physicist at the University of Technology Sydney and the UTS Center for Quantum Software and Information, in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“It's so far beyond the reality of science.”
The characters in the movie shrink to a size smaller than molecules and atoms — there would likely be no oxygen or sound waves at the quantum level.
As Lang and company suffocate to death with no one to hear their desperate pleas, their bodies would likely be ravaged by conditions similar to the vacuum of space. It would decimate a range of bodily processes.
Far from the bright, colorful, and whimsical microcosm, Lang ventured into during the movie, at quantum size, existence is likely a dark and dreary place for humans.
The light our vision processes is derived from photons that operate at that level, meaning Ant-Man and company probably wouldn’t be able to discern any colors with their eyes.
All of this, of course, glosses over the quandary of how one can even shrink to that size in the first place, considering that our bodies are composed of atoms and all sorts of quantum material.
“Maybe shrinking down to that size would give you direct access to that world. But I think we have to remember that we're made of atoms. So in a sense, we're in the Quantum Realm,” Ferrie explained. “You can't shrink your atoms in size, or you can't shrink the distance between the atoms.”
Compressing the distance between atoms would tinker with the various forces that ultimately define how molecules are stitched together.
“They are where they are not because of some arbitrary reason … it's perfectly precise. It's like Lego blocks have been stuck together. You can't change that. If you tried to push atoms together, the force repelling them would increase,” Ferrie added.
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One explanation that could potentially rectify some of Quantumania’s deviations from science would be to maintain that rather than shrinking down to quantum size, the characters simply changed dimensions, Sandeep Goyal, theoretical physicist and assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali, told the Washington Examiner.
“In string theory … the universe is made of strings. And the different vibrations in those strings tell you what kind of particle it is. Then you can also think that maybe there are two different universes and the strings are vibrating at different frequencies for those two universes,” Goyal said.
“In that way, you can say that a subatomic universe is not really subatomic, but just that it seems like it is embedded in our bigger universe,” he added.
Marvel has periodically given glimpses and teases of the “Quantum Realm” in prior movies, but Quantumania went all in. The miniature dimension operates as the basement of the MCU’s Multiverse and was paramount to the Avengers' time-travel mission to undo the genocidal mad purple Titan Thanos’s snap with the Infinity Gauntlet that dusted half of the universe.
In Avengers: Endgame, Lang inexplicably time-jumped about five years into the future and helped Earth’s mightiest heroes do the same later on by leveraging the “Quantum Realm.” His latest quantum incursion did not appear to have such a time jump, although at one point, Janet Van Dyne suggested that his past experiences were in a region described as “the void,” whereas, in Quantumania, our heroes were operating near Kang’s fiefdom.
Still, the time travel aspect of the “Quantum Realm” is far-fetched, according to Ferrie.
“There's nothing in the equations of quantum physics that suggests that you can travel through time. I don't even think that's really kind of related to quantum physics at all,” Ferrie said.
Another hallmark of the quantum trip was a subatomic world rife with organic matter, such as battle-hardened sentient buildings, human-looking creatures, oddly-shaped red jelly critters that produce language barrier-breaking gue, and a floating maniacal head (M.O.D.A.K.).
While scientists have been testing multiple theories about quantum physics, some of the current science suggests that subatomic particles don’t have a specific size, meaning there is currently no evidence of fantastical subatomic creatures like the ones in the action-packed thriller.
“In quantum physics, you have things like atoms, and they take up size right, but the things that they're made of, like the fundamental particles in the Standard Model, take up no size — at that point, it's just math,” Ferrie explained. “In some sense, our best theory of physics suggests that particles aren't even real.”
“[In] Quantum Field Theory, which is sort of our current theory that connects sort of everything that we observe, [it] says that there's just fields — fields that permeate all of space, and the particles that appear in particle physics are just like, temporary excitations in this field, so they're not even real,” Ferrie added.
Despite its divergence from science, Quantumania gave a few nods or name-drops to real quantum physics concepts, albeit with considerable fiction imbued in it. One example was the possibility cloud that Lang encountered while trying to retrieve the multiversal power core.
“The possibility cloud thing is not there in physics, but in quantum mechanics … [a particle] is most likely at one place, but there is some possibility of it being in other places also. So the position state of an object is not just one fixed position,” Goyal explained.
Scientists have long poked holes in the physics logic behind Ant-Man’s superpowers. The same has been done with a plethora of other superheroes.
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For instance, scientists contend that a man-sized ant, as seen in the Antman trilogy, would likely be unable to move due to scaling problems with its body size. It would also struggle to breathe because the surface area of its spiracles, which ants use to collect oxygen, would be too small. Other hurdles that would affect humans like Lang and his Ant-Man family in shrinking down to ant size include increased air resistance at that scale.
“The point is entertainment … You go, you get entertained. And then you come back to reality,” Ferrie said. “In reality, science is like every other job. You can be excited about it. But the day-to-day stuff is quite boring.”