Physics and Marvel never mixed well. As the guy who tried to stir that big stew pot, I can reaffirm that statement. During my Marvel Universe days and nights, I had to dream up at least a dozen ways for people to fly all by themselves. I tried very hard not to repeat myself.
I’m no scientist though I could play one on TV. I might claim a new field of science: Comic Book Physics. Through childhood, I read a balance of science fiction and general science. I credit Isaac Asimov and his prodigious output of books on popular science for sounding as knowledgeable as I did. That and the Scientific American magazine.
It was just such a popular science article in Sky & Telescope magazine (I know, I lived in midtown Manhattan and could see about 5 stars, including the Sun—but ya gotta dream) that gave me my start in Comic Book Physics. I was crouched within my shadowy stat-room in the early part of 1979, reading through the long-duration exposures of my stat-camera to kill time.
It discussed higher dimensions as real things. In fact, the sentence that still sticks in my memory is, “there are 17 additional dimensions folded in every proton.”
Well! I chewed on my coffee cup over that one. I recall thinking that we could never get away with that kind of nonsense in comics! And I was right; in short order, they downsized the territory to 11. Which, believe it or not, is the current thinking these days.
Just a few years later, I was mulling things over with Mark Gruenwald, during the gestation period of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and the up-coming page about Ant-Man was being debated. (I have noted elsewhere, that the first book of the first series is the kindest to actually read.)
At this point in comic time—roughly the early 80s– Ant-Man had been one of those sleepy little characters. Too much fun to draw, not enough fun to write but you could really kick him around! Anyone get a load of Giant Man? Oh sure, big guy—but he would get weak in the knees after enough rough-housing. Which, I hasten to add has nothing to do with the “square/cube” law. If you double the size of something you are eight-timesing the volume of that thing. Take a bunch of standard-sized blocks of any kind and see for yourself. It explains why, ahem, ants look like ants and elephants look the way they do—cross-section of knee joints to be specific.
Then the writers got cute. They wanted Ant-Man to be small but still pack a punch; to still be able to do things. They wanted the fellow to punch full-sized people and have it act like a regular punch. Much the same as we are seeing in the recent Marvel movie world version of Ant-Man (in my top 5 Marvel movies—take your arguments outside).
Still, the Mr.-Technical-Me starts asking, why does not the Ant-Man’s tiny-but-with-full-sized-mass fist just punch a little hole in the various peoples faces? Ant-Man now weighs two-tenths of an ounce but can punch a full-sized man in the face and that man is knocked over…
New York City Flashback: young Eliot, 22-year-old would-be cineaste, would regularly go to the Little Carnegie Cinema to watch older movies. Great little theater located in the same building as Carnegie Hall. One movie was The Incredible Shrinking Man (book title: The Shrinking Man).
Based on a 1956 novel by sci-fi legend Richard Matheson (Logan’s Run, Last Man on Earth (movie title: Omega Man)—TV work on The Outer Limits, Star Trek… a lot) and almost immediately made into a movie (1957). Directed by the remarkable Jack Arnold, who brought a lot of elegance and mood to what are regarded as “B pictures”—one of his other classics: The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Hard to say which is the more famous.
Not long after that, Fantastic Voyage (1967) came out. Wonderful “high concept” story. Everyone should have seen this by now, old-style “big” movie making at its best. An essential Cold War scientist needs to have a really delicate surgical procedure that can only be done from the “inside.” So the CMDF (you think Area 51 is top secret!) will take a special crew, shrink them down and stuff them into the sick scientist to fix him. It is filled with bone-headed mistakes! It is also filled with early Racquel Welch as a perfect mad-scientist’s assistant! So distracting is she that you’ll hardly wonder that full-sized air molecules can be breathed by ultra-tiny people!
Just how do you shrink down anything? Never mind the fairly nauseating car compactor method. How do you keep everything in working order, including mentation? Suppose you could toss out just a few molecules here and there, preserving the greater part to keep things like heart and nerve ganglia going—that might work pretty well. But by the time you get down to ant-size level there’s not much left.
Perhaps you could reduce the volume of each atom. After all, any atom is mostly empty—you know, the old—“if an atom were the size of the Earth’s orbit, an electron would be Earth and the Sun would be the nucleus with nothing in between.” Now we’re talking! Run that “Earth” into the orbit of “Mercury” and that’s a huge reduction. The biggest problem here would be changing the basic forces of nature. We understand that the electron’s distance from the proton is a function of the Electromagnetic Force—one of those basic forces. For us out here, it acts kind’a like the force of a super magnet.
Remember that proton mentioned earlier? Those generally live inside the nucleus. There are several other dimensions tucked away in there. If there were a way to quickly shuttle some of that Electromagnetic Force binding energy inside the proton, then it could still operate. Picture the lines of force first as a straight shoelace then one in a tied-shoelace pattern. The straight shoelace would connect the distant electron to the nucleus. Then, when tied up, the tied part would now hold the electron in place on the nucleus (your ankle!) but the rest of the lace would take up less room.
Never mind all the other inter-atomic particles that keep things working—let’s further suppose that Hank Pym’s genius (I call him ‘Hank’ because I consider him a distant relative of the family) was to discover a particle that shunted the EM force into another dimension.
Since it would behave like no other particle, perhaps a collected amount would act more like a liquid and be amenable to be placed in a cannister the size of a lady’s compact. I had to specify a “magnetic containment” field—but I hate having battery-powered devices in comics—especially back in the bad-old days of batteries.
Such are the thought processes I went through way back when. The “where” was Ralph’s pool. That famous watering hole of comic lore. The office-bound creative team was taking a little time off to do—what else? Argue about characters’ super-powers! And maybe jump in the pool.
Editorial team Mark Gruenwald and Mike Carlin were haranguing me. This was only the first book—and we were agonizing over everything. “A” is for Ant-Man…. Great brains Peter Sanderson and Peter Benno Gillis were observing and chiming in. Ralph was too busy looking good, poolside.
I was struggling to point out that the long-held idea that whatever it was that Ant-Man had in those belt-mounted cannisters was certainly not a compressed gas or fluid. That what was always shown was a couple of “vapor lines.” My specific argument was that whatever it was, it could not act over the entire volume of a human body as quickly as suggested by the (decades’ worth of) art. Thus I considered those lines to be the visual representation of a field effect.
Also, which I admit was a finer point of arguing, chemical actions were fairly well understood. Chemicals didn’t eliminate mass. Whereas the sub-atomic realm was a really poorly understood one. These days we have found out just how badly we know what goes on at the very small scale. The so-called quantum level is really unknown. Probably not unknowable—the Higgs Boson gives us hope. But dark matter and dark energy are both still elusive.
Whatever I said, Mark let me have my way. Alas, I was still cowardly enough to continue to call the “stuff” a gas. Ah well…
The arrow that pointed to where that ‘exit port’ was may have fallen off between the office and the separators… I sure would like to know now! Yeesh– shameful. You do know I soaked my wounded sensibilities in cash money, don’t you? ©2018 Marvel/Disney
So how does this Pym Particle stop at the boundary of Pym’s body/suit? Uh… heh heh… gimme a second here… because, like the outer boundary of any object—the outer-most electron shells of one object are repelled by any other object’s electron shells. It’s how we walk around, hold things, etc. In the first edition of MU, I associated the Pym Particle with the human nervous system. If I had used another one of my made-up words there, I could comfortably call myself a genius. As it was, I did not use “psion” until much later. Not so smart.
I saw psions as the “telepathy” intermediary particle. When one talks about sub-atomic particles we are now referring to a thick soup of particles, not just good old electrons, neutrons and protons. That Electromagnetic Force I mentioned has particles associated with it, just as all the other forces. The other one I invoked—so far undiscovered—is the “graviton.” (Which I did not invent—don’t know who; but since all the other forces are associated with sub-atomic particles, there’s one for gravity too!) Well, people have to fly somehow! And since it’s all mentally controlled (force of will—similar to editors getting work out of freelancers) psions just have to pair up with gravitons… (How do you think Sue Storm moves objects with her mind?)
Or–! With the Pym Particle! That way, the human spirit, which fills each of our bodies, is a contained entity. Thus only affected by the particle (we all really like saying, “Pym Particle”—which is probably how I got my way ‘cause Mark liked saying it).
Ant-Man caused me to re-state other things. Of course, Stan invented ant communication. I just had to explain it. That was a tall order because first, something that looked a lot like a 1980s radio chassis was intercepting Hank’s brainwaves and turning them into “ant brain waves.” Nowadays we have super-sensitive detectors that can pick up our brain signals. Turning them into something we can use has been done (this super-science had allowed kids to play video games hands-free—excellent! We now know the future is secure). But not anywhere in the 1960s save for Hank’s mad scientist laboratory.
What this did to Henry Pym was to make him a super-genius polymath. He was a theoretical and practical physicist, electronics engineer and developer, a highly skilled machinist (those little belt cannisters were no joke! And that helmet… !?) and a seamstress… Okay, someone had to put his costume together.
And a world-class myrmecologist! That last was in his spare time.