• Question: can you manipulate atoms so you can shrink yourself

    Asked by anon-260320 on 6 Oct 2020.
    • Photo: James Smallcombe

      James Smallcombe answered on 6 Oct 2020:

      Unfortunately not, at least not as far as I know. Atoms are like tiny opposing magnets, when you try and push them together you have to use lots of energy and they will just spring apart.
      Or worse if we push them together with enough energy the nuclei might fuse! This would make entirely different atoms and we might end compressing you into a tiny hot iron ball.

      One way to make atoms smaller is to replace the electrons with heavier versions of the same type of particle called muons. Muons are about 200 times heavier than electrons, so they orbit much closer to the centre of an atom making the whole atom smaller. But because they are so much heavier the chemistry, which is dominated by electrons, would be all messed up and your body might stop working or just disintegrate.

    • Photo: Richard Fielder

      Richard Fielder answered on 6 Oct 2020:

      Unfortunately not. The size of atoms and distance between them is determined by the strength of the forces between the particles that make them up. In order to change that, we’d have to change the laws of physics to either change the strength of the electromagnetic force or to change the charge of electrons and protons. If we were able to do that, it would affect much more than just our size.

      There is one way we can sort of change the size of atoms though. Muons are another particle that are very similar to electrons, but a lot heavier. If we replace the electrons in an atom with muons, they orbit much closer to the nucleus and make the atom much smaller overall. Unfortunately muons decay very quickly, so the smaller atoms only last a fraction of a second. If you could somehow replace all the electrons in your body with muons at the same time, you could possibly become very small, but only for a very short time before you exploded.

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