Dr. Grey Matter Answers Keith Giffen's Stupid Question

Over at CBR in the column Unfortunate Confluence of Words, Keith Giffen asks several questions including this one:

 

24) When The Atom shrinks small enough to move between atoms, what does he breathe?

 

Keith Giffen has done a lot for me. For DC Comics Presents # 59 alone, I feel that I owe him something, so in that vein of gratefulness, I’m going to try to get that question answered for him. Of course, such a complex question is far beyond my poor reasoning skills, so I am going to risk enlisting the aid of the insidious Dr. Grey Matter, a noted scientist and war criminal, whose plot to conquer the island of Bora Bora with clones gestated in the wombs of chimps would almost certainly have worked if not for the interference of the agents of F.O.R.C.E.

 

And so I give you to the humble-ish font of knowledge, directly from this cell in the ... well, I’m not allowed to tell you where his cell is, at least not until the last of the Destructoids have been rounded up, Dr. Grey Matter! Take it away, Dr. Grey Matter!

 

 

Bah! Dr. Grey Matter is not your lackey and will not answer the question because you or Keith Giffen ask Dr. Grey Matter to. Dr. Grey Matter answers this question only because Dr. Grey Matter wants to rub your faces in your own ignorance. Then you and all your descendents will know that Dr. Grey Matter’s intellect reigns supreme!

 

To understand how shrinkers like the Atom are able to survive when they are shrunken down a size smaller than an oxygen atom, you must stop thinking like an idiot and start thinking like Dr. Grey Matter. (Ha! Impossible!) You must understand that super shrinkers do not really lose mass. They lose qualities of mass … or expressions of mass … or aspects of mass, but not the actual mass. They are still made up of the organs, tissues, excretions, and such that have always comprised them, and those substances are still made up of elements, and those elements are still made up of atoms and so on. All of the stuff is still there, but it has different qualities, it is expressed differently, and it has different aspects than their mass usually does. The mass (i.e. the quantity of matter) is there, but it expresses itself with less volume, its gravitational qualities are abated, and it inertial aspects are diminished. The shrinkers do not lose mass. They change the character of their mass in a manner that is similar to losing mass but clearly is not losing mass.

If these shrinkers were actually losing mass, they would be subject to all kinds of problems. Their organs would cease to function because it is the mass of their organs, the stuff that organs are made of, the chemicals, would no longer be there for their organs to perform the functions they perform. But when we see Shrinking Violet or the Atom at super mini size, they still appear to have limbs and blood and brains that function. Therefore, they must still have all their parts down to the most miniscule. The trick to shrinking would be to not lose mass but to alter mass on a sub-quantum level, to leave all the subatomic particles in place but to change the ways in which they express themselves, to play with the underlying mathematical equations or matrixes that govern those particles. If the problem of creating shrinking were a game of chess, the solution would not be to remove your opponent's pieces from the board but to convince your opponent to change the rules.

We can see this most easily in Ray Palmer, who not only alters his size but also his apparent mass. When the Atom appears to decrease his mass, he doesn't turn into a wispy cloud of his former self and when he appears to increase his mass while shrunken, he doesn't turn into an immobile chunk of hyper-dense material. This strongly suggests that there is no actual increase or decrease in his matter, but rather there is a change in the way the qualities of his mass are expressed.

Once it is understood that all the matter is still there, the problem of breathing vanishes as even the simplest of mad sci… er, scientists can see. Matter is an expression of energy and energy an expression of matter. If the matter is still there, the energy is still there.

 

To over simplify, the energy that people use is created by oxidizing molecules, not terribly unlike burning fuel. The less energy you use, the less fuel you burn, the less oxygen you need, and the less you have to breathe. The only reason you breathe is to power your body. The less energy you need to power you body, as when you are at rest, the less you need to breathe. The more you exert, as when you are sprinting, the more you need to breathe. Imagine if you will that your car’s battery and all the gasoline in your engine where used to power a Matchbox Car? Your battery and gasoline would last much longer because the energy needed to move a tiny toy would be much less than the energy needed to power your larger vehicle.

To illustrate how shrinking eliminates the breathing problem, we will use the dearly departed Ant-Man, who couldn't even shrink to the atomic sizes of some of the universes’ better shrinkers. The average man is approximately 5' 10" which is 70 inches tall. When shrunken, Ant-Man is about 0.7 inches tall or 1/100th his usual height. Ant-Man's total volume has been shrunken not only in height, but also in width and depth. All three dimensions have been reduced to 1/100th of what they were, so his total volume is 100*100*100 or 1,000,000 less than it was before. While all of Ant-Man's matter is still there, it has been changed and acts as if it were diminished in the same ratio as the diminishment in volume; therefore, his mass will also act as if it were 1/1,000,000th of what it actually is. The energy burnt by Ant-Man would mostly be used up in moving and powering his own body, which is now a million times easier to move and power than it had been and would, therefore, take 1/1000000th the energy to move. Let's assume that while exerting himself to his utmost while at full size, Ant-Man could still hold his breath for 6 seconds. If exerting himself at ant size means moving what would seem to be 1/1000000th as much mass, he should be burning energy at 1/1000000th the rate as he does at full size. Therefore, if he could hold his breath for 6 seconds while exerting himself at full size, he should be able to hold his breath for 6,000,000 seconds at ant size. That's 69 days, 10 hours, and 40 minutes.

When the Atom shrinks to the size of an atom, he is shrinking to approximately 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of his original volume. That should let him hold his breath for 1,902,587,519,000,000,000,000 years, give or take an eon. In short, he could hold his breath for a trillion times longer than the universe has existed. Or shorter still, the Atom doesn't breathe when he’s that small.

 

And so Dr. Grey Matter has again explained the unexplainable. Dr. Grey Matter is your master! Bow before Dr. Grey Matter, you and all your descendents!

 

 

Thank you, Dr. Grey Matter.

 

If you wish to read more of Dr. Grey Matter’s, you can read his column, The Insidious Dr. Grey Matter Answers Your Stupid Questions, in this year’s Prism Guide to LGBT Comics.