What Would Happen To Your Body If You Were Shot By A Shrink Ray?

Mass is no small problem

Ant-Man may be able to reduce himself to tiny sizes with little concern, thanks to the fictitious “Pym particles”, but in reality, his journey down to insect stature would likely make a mess of his body. And that’s putting it mildly.

The first impediment to someone wanting to shrink something, someone, or themselves, is the issue known as the conservation of mass. In short, this fundamental principle states that mass cannot be created or destroyed in a closed system through normal chemical or physical processes. Apply this to a shrinking person, and you have a situation where the mass of their body will remain the same unless there is a way to transform some of it into something else, like energy.

However, if this doesn’t happen, then Ant-Man or any other shrinkee would find themselves condensed into a rather uncomfortable state. Given that the mass stays the same as the volume shrinks, the person’s body is going to get denser the smaller they get. This may sound trivial but that would have severe implications for their biological tissues (more on this later).

You can’t shrink atoms 

At the same time, the atoms in our bodies, as well as any matter, have a fixed size. We may think of atoms like little planetary models, with a nucleus at the center and electrons orbiting them, but this is overly simplistic. In reality, the electrons occupy energy levels around the nucleus, which are called electron shells. If atoms were compressed, then these shells would be forced closer together, but because electrons are negatively charged, they tend to repel one another due to electrostatic force. It would require an immense amount of energy to overcome this force and to sustain it.

But let’s imagine this is doable. What would happen as a result?

Say you fire the shrink ray at yourself, for whatever reason (we don’t judge), your atoms are compressed and you become much smaller. Now your atoms are forced closer together, electron degeneracy pressure becomes significant. Basically, electrons from neighboring atoms and molecules will be pushing against one another. Although there may be some room for compression here, overall, the pressure pushes back. This is essentially the same pressure that stops white dwarf stars from collapsing in on themselves. This is due to Pauli’s exclusion principle, whereby no two electrons in the same atom can occupy the same quantum state at the same time.

But let’s say you overcome that too. What next? Well, compressing atoms like this may also cause electrons to enter the nucleus, leading to electron capture – essentially where an electron is absorbed into a proton-rich nucleus. If this happens too much, then the composition of the atomic nuclei in the shrunken person’s body would change, resulting in transformations to the elements and isotopes it contains. But more drastic than this, all the energy needed to achieve this compression would create an enormous amount of heat. The new shrinking technology would need to manage the heat created by this process, otherwise it would effectively cook you. So you may end up small, but now you’re tiny toast.

Our bodies work at a particular scale

Even though the physics of shrinking is pretty damning, the biological impacts are arguably worse. For entertainment’s sake, let’s say we somehow create a shrink ray that can overcome the limits imposed by physics as we know them, what would happen to a shrunken body?

Biological structures like cells, tissues, and organs need specific arrangements to function properly, if these are compressed too then they stop working. For instance, cells have a minimum functional size, as they contain organelles. If they were compressed through shrinking, a cell’s delicate phospholipid bilayer, which makes up its membrane, may rupture, much like a balloon being squeezed smaller and smaller.

At the same time, our organs function at a specific scale. If someone shrunk, then their entire internal architecture would be disrupted. This could impair their ability to do vital things, such as breathing or even pumping blood around their body.

The lungs, for example, rely on a large surface area to take in oxygen through gas exchange. This is achieved through millions of alveoli – microscopic balloon-like structures located at the end of respiratory trees – which expand during inhalation (bringing in oxygen) and compress during exhalation (expelling carbon dioxide). In the body of a shrunken person, however, the crucial surface area would be reduced, meaning they may struggle to exchange enough oxygen or carbon dioxide for their needs, depending on how small they are. This would either lead to hypoxia (too little oxygen) or hypercapnia (too much carbon dioxide).

Another issue the hapless shrunken person would probably experience is an increased metabolism. A tiny human would quickly find their world to be a lot colder, as their body’s larger surface area to volume ratio would mean they rapidly lose heat to their environment. Many small species have developed higher metabolisms to address this issue, so a shrunken human could find their metabolism suddenly skyrocketing as their body fights to maintain warmth.

In order to overcome this, the shrunken person would need to eat pretty much their body weight in food every day to maintain this.

Of course, these outcomes for the shrunken human are all hypothetical and there are numerous other insurmountable physical and biological problems for someone facing this fate. Given this situation, would it still be worth creating a shrink ray? I guess the answer comes down to what you’re using it for and how much you dislike the person being shrunk. But if you’re some evil genius just looking to terrorize a foe, there are probably cheaper and more efficient ways to do it. If, however, you wanted to experience it yourself, it may be worth finding other goals.