when?
A device with which you can make very small things and living things.
Where did you see?
Whether super movie ant Man He (with a shrunken suit), or classic comedies from the ’80s honey i shrunk kids (with shrinkage radius), the idea that you can make people and animals much smaller with a device has been in the imagination for decades.
How close are we?
It doesn’t matter whether it’s your palm, a newspaper page, a football, or a grain on the surface of a planet on the other side of the universe, if you zoom in enough, you’ll discover that everything around us is made of particles. From molecules, atoms, and even smaller “elementary” particles that you can’t break into even smaller pieces.
This is the physical fact that everyone who wants to build a minification package has to deal with. If you want to make a piece of paper smaller, you can tear it into pieces. But shrink the entire sheet, including the sentences written on it, without changing it radically … There is only one way to do this: by shrinking each part makes a piece of paper into a piece of paper. Including every particle.
An electron, a quark, every elementary particle has a fixed size. Making such particles smaller than they already are, as far as we know, is impossible.
So over and over again, with the reducer beam as a feasible tool someday?
Before we jump to conclusions, let’s just say this. In 2018, a group of scholars wrote in trade magazine Science How did they manage to shrink things down. Or, as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote In the press release About this research: “It’s not over yet ant Manbut this system produces 3D structures one-thousandth the size of the originals.
Incidentally, this was categorically about inanimate 3D objects and not living things. During the experiment, the researchers placed the structures in a hydrogel similar to the absorbent material you would find in baby diapers. They saturated this gel with a liquid in which the molecules are dissolved so that you can attach it to the structure to be reduced as stabilizers using laser light. When you then add an acid, these molecules begin to attract each other, making the jelly and body even smaller.
In the same year researchers published in the trade magazine Journal of the American Chemical Society A method of shrinking a mass of a gel-like substance that contains human cells or bacteria. Here, too, the university’s press release once again referred to the science fiction canon:Darling, I’ve cut back on the cell culture’was the main title From the press release†
However, these types of technologies are still very far from science fiction applications. Researchers can use this […] For example creating balls, grooves or loops in the material. And the university wrote in its letter that it is like squeezing a rug from below to make hills and valleys on the roof.
Thus, it is a technological trick for those who wish to manufacture structures or small objects. For now, you don’t have to worry about your kids accidentally shrinking down to the size of an ant with a trial contraction radius.
