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In Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Wayne Szalinski describes his shrink-ray as reducing the "empty space" in matter to make things smaller. Granting the central conceit of the movie that such a thing is possible, it does not seem to follow that this altered matter would be able to interact normally with unaltered matter.

For example, how would lungs made out of this altered matter be able to process full-size oxygen molecules? For that matter, even atomic interactions we take for granted like friction and non-permeability of solid materials could potentially follow bizarre and unpredictable rules.

Was this ever addressed in any of the other films? I haven't watched them all, having heard years ago that they were terrible :)

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It's worse than that. An 80 pound kid is nothing on concrete at full size, but shrunken until his footprint has the area of a pinhead but keep his mass the same and he'd sink through most flooring (save maybe thick concrete). Of course the compressive strength of the tissue in his legs wouldn't increase from his own perspective, so coming out bottom side he might look something like hamburger meat. Then there's the fact that they likely wouldn't even be able to see what with apparent Doppler shifting... it's just a mess. No plausible explanations possible. – John O Nov 26 '12 at 22:10
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In his Fantastic Voyage redux Asimov handled it by positing a field that reduced Planck's constant. Reduced inertia, reduced mass, time compression effect, fixed the EM wavelength problems, too. All this would have just confused the eight-year olds targeted by the movie, though. – Kyle Jones Nov 26 '12 at 23:23
@KyleJones Nice idea there. I presume the field affected everything that moved within it (e.g.: air molecules being inhaled/exhaled) as well as the original subject matter? – Iszi Nov 27 '12 at 18:53
@Izki Yes, and the field was persistent once applied to an object, but with a small probability of sudden re-expansion. This of course added tension to the story. – Kyle Jones Nov 27 '12 at 20:14
+1 just for the cheekiness of asking a Honey, I Shrunk the X question – Frank Pierce Nov 28 '12 at 17:45

1 Answer

up vote 10 down vote

This film was basically a fantasy film with no attention paid to the physics behind it.

There are so many issues as to why this would never ever work that I am not really sure where I would even start!

Overall, no these films do not address that - they are not aimed at an audience that would care or probably even understand.

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