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I know that this is purely science fiction, but I thought I would get a little discussion going in this forum. The physics or science forum has been touched in a long while. And I thought it was time for me to talk of different thing instead of just astronomy, like the universe or black hole. This may be fun, if I can get people to read it and join in.

I remember an old sci-fi movie, but I don't remember the movie title, in which they shrank a group people to microscopic size and sent them into another human body in submarine or spaceship-type of vessel.

Scientifically, can you shrink a person that size, without damaging the human physiology.

The way I understand science is that if you shrink a person, the person would probably retain the same mass when he is normal. He may take up small space, but if his mass remain the same, he would become denser. I believe that there is threshold on how dense a human body can withstand, before he become crush by his own mass. And if you continue to shrink him, the person would no longer become human, but a very dense mass of blob. His physical makeup, such as genes and cells would no longer resemble that of human genes and cells.

Shrinking a person would only be possible if you can shrink his mass in proportion to his volume.

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nothing i know of in physics would make it impossible to place a human's molecules closer together (thereby "shrinking" him). you make a good point though that this process might cause him to no longer be human, or possibly no longer living.

depending on the definition of shrinking, removing mass may not be considered shrinking. i also wonder if that would make the human either non-human or not alive...

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Losing weight is one way to reduce mass from a person, but shrinking a person seemed to be altogether different.

That's why I think the person shrink in size either (1) through becoming denser or (2) through size in proportional of mass.

The 1st scenario would most likely kill a person. It would sort of like being imploded or being crushed by the gravitational force of a black hole.

Or it would mostly like change a person. Take pure carbon for example. You can make graphite out of carbon, but if you compact it even further (heat and pressure plays a huge role in this), so that the carbon would become denser, then you would have something totally different from graphite, which is diamond.

The 2nd scenario is possibly the best way, but this would seem impossible.

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good point with the graphite / diamond thing. the idea of taking matter away got me thinking of something else i've thought of before: if it were possible to collect all the necessary molecules and assemble them in the configuration of a human body, would it be alive?

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I don't know. Could be. Do you re-assemble them into a shorter and smaller size?

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I'm more interesting in knowing who it is you want to shrink.

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Bin Laden and co, Saddam Huissien, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, all Islamic clerics that support jihad and terrorism, Robert Mugabe, George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard. There are more than just this list, but it's morning, and I had just woken up.

So I can squash them like under my boot, like the cockroraches they really are.

But serious though. I only here to discuss what would happen if you shrink a person.

Can it be done without killing that person? Can it be done without changing him into something that is not human?

My biology and chemistry lessons in high school is a long time ago, so there are people who would know more or remember more than me.

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Firstly the movie you are talking about is called inner space.

Secondly you will never be able to shrink a human, and for many reasons.
Going down from you as a human as a whole to lets say your heart and from there the inticate web of capillarys that make the heart up. Down to the membranes that make these up etc etc..... to the already very small human genome and to the DNA that makes it up. And the millions of combintations of the G A T C protiens that in suit make that up. See where i am going. For the body to be "shrunk" all of these will have to be shrunk relative to the proprtional scale they already have in a normal sized human.

With the very small we have a very big problem. Nothing in the macro world of what we are used to applys in the quantum world so.......
Cells would scramble, DNA break down and form other wierd things like maybe jam. Legs would stop being legs etc etc

This would also violate countless conservation of enery laws, Newtons laws on partical motion, inter-particle space, power-law potentials, partical derivative, gradient, divergence, curl, potential field and so forth.

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differential equations! gross!

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 misterhaan writes...


i ment partical behaviour, not maths. sorry

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I am still at high school, so don't quote me on this.
But if you started with a reasonably proportioned midget, put her on a diet, then simulated a living area where the gravity was slightly high than normal and repeated this, the spine would shrink and thanks to a diet and carefully controlled an monitored malnutrition the organs, might just get smaller.
What do you think, am I right?
I'd love it if I was, because one of my dreams hinges on shrinking a human.