duntemann.wbst (12/08/82)
There are more worms in the concept of miniaturization than are immediately obvious, as with most good SF fetishes. I can think of only one author who even tried to come to grips with any of them, and that's our old friend Dr. Asimov. I read Fantastic Voyage when it was originally serialized in (would you believe) the Saturday Evening Post early in 1966, and later when the book hit print. Here's a couple of points Dr. A. brought to light: You do not compress space without dilating time. Time passed much more slowly for the microsub's passengers than it did for the Real World. What was one hour in the Real World was a great many hours in Benes' bloodstream. Communication with the sub was next to impossible. Rdaio waves produced by the sub were actually wavelength-reduced far beyond visible light into UV. It was tracked on its journey by radiation from its nuclear power plant. You do not simply poke a tube into Benes' lungs to grab more air to breathe; the air molecules are almost literally big enough for the sub's passengers to see; in the novel they used an on-board miniaturizer to reduce the size of the air molucules to compatibility with what was on board. Asimov never explained why, but his contention was that radioactive material is not reduceable, so that the atomic pile in the sub's engine was driven by a speck of nuclear dust which "grew" to the proper size as the sub shrank. The screenplay played fast and loose with some of these items, but the novel did its best to jive with physics as we knew them in 1966. Visually, the film was stunning for its time; in particular the views of the interior of the brain, with l;uminous purple impulses racing along spinderweb neurons, impressed the hell out of 13-year-old me. I caught the film's great error, even then: They didn't take the sub out with them, and left behind fifty tons of metal and glass atoms to automatically return to normal size inside Benes' poor head. Now that's an Excedrin headache... (In the book, of course, the micronauts made damned sure the white blood cell which engulfed the sub followed them out through Benes' tear ducts, and they "grew" in the miniaturization room with a proper pile of wreckage behind them. Asimov always comes through.) I know of no other work of fiction which dealt so squarely with the problems of large-scale miniaturization. --Jeff Duntemann duntemann.wbst@parc-maxc
bstempleton (12/11/82)
Well, one thing that Fantastic Voyage never dealt with was that they injected a shrunken 60 gallon drum of water into the guy with the double shrunk submarine. I'm not sure what would happen, but when that water expanded, boy would he have to go to the bathroom something fierce! Brad |-)
3133rvh (12/14/82)
f I remember correctly, the movie had the sub reduced in two stages. After the first stage the sub was put in a LARGE hypodermic filled with water. The hypo was then reduced to "normal" size and the sub was injected. The movie never explained what happened to all that half reduced watter - did the book explain this?
lewis%Shasta@spider.UUCP (02/10/84)
No Isaac Asimov did NOT write Fantastic Voyage. He ONLY wrote the
novelization of the screenplay. He said he did his best to retrieve
the obvious absurdities of the main premise of shrinking people, but
it was really hopeless. Since the producers of the movie seem to have
contributed to the mistaken impression that Isaac DID write the movie,
it's easy to form that impression.
- SufordAlan%DCT.AC.UK%DUNDEE.AC.UK@ucl-cs.ARPA (08/22/85)
From: Alan Greig <CCD-ARG%dct@ucl-cs.arpa> > From: Keith Dale <kdale@minet-vhn-em.arpa> > 1. The miniaturization process begins with setting up an > homogeneous field around the object(s) to be mini'ed. > What kind of field? Well, a field that reacts in equal > force or amount to all points within it. So, Flaky > Assumption #1 is: this field does not behave according > to the inverse square rule. Hang on. Without even going any further than your first 'Flaky Assumption', what's wrong with homogeneous fields ? F(x,y,z,t)=(6,6,6) ok to me as a nice three dimensional time independent vector field. As a practical example air resistance is the same in any direction you care to move in being dependent on the gas density. What about the electric field between 2 charged plate conductors (ok in theory they should be infinite for perfection). Then don't forget the electric field due to a dipole which falls off as inverse cube. What about Gauss ? What about billions of other examples. Or have I missed something entirely ? Alan Greig Computer Centre Dundee College of Technology Dundee Scotland Janet: Alan%DCT@DDXA Arpa: Alan%DCT@UCL-CS.ARPA -------
mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) (09/03/85)
What's all this about fields and loss of mass and where does the
energy go? One failing is that it doesn't explain the enlargement
capability of the technology (it could enlarge as well as shrink,
remember). What's wrong with the explanation given (in the book, I
haven't seen the movie)? As I recall it, this is that matter is a
"shadow", a projection of *something* onto space-time. Miniaturization
is the manipulation of this something to change the projection. Clearly
this is a rather strange sort of projection; but I feel certain the
mathematics would be no worse than some of the hair necessary for (say)
quantum mechanics.
I find this at least as plausible as a "field" which can remove
99.9% of the mass and size of an electron and still leave something
which behaves as an electron (on a smaller scale, to be sure).
As for full-size photons knocking miniaturized electrons away, I
have a couple of points to mention here. One, who says full-size
photons interact with miniaturized particles? Oh yes, that's right, our
heroes have to be able to see unminiaturized objects by unminiaturized
light. Second, so we have a more energetic photon bashing an atom. How
is this situation different from an X-ray (or gamma ray or ...) photon
bashing a full-size atom? All this will mean is the spectrum of the
room lights gets shifted towards the blue end of the scale....
--
der Mouse
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