MagicScarf

Scarf the Magic-User

@MagicScarf

Subject to change (in a tf way)

  • he/she/they

Refractive Geode
Plural, kinky asexual, >21, offshoot of @SnepGem
We’re a system of 50+ gender-fluid furries obsessed with transformation, clothing, costumes, gender, magic, and the ways they interact.
Most of us are humans, and we all seem to change back to our “default forms” over time, even recovering from transformations that would otherwise be permanent.
The doors to the Nonsense-Castle, our headspace, are always open to visitors, so feel free to swing by via our ask box! Transform a headmate, or strike up a conversation, or present some cool magical item or idea, or start an entire Plot Arc, or whatever!

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MagicScarf
@MagicScarf

Macro/Micro-related Science Question

đŸ§Ș Got a fun physics-y question related to size change stuff, though the scenario would be a little specific so bear with me.

Say you enter a magical portal to another world that is inhabited by giants. There is no guarantee of anything in this other world being the same as in the previous one, aside from the general rules of chemistry and physics and the like (atoms are still atoms, etc) (mostly this just means that it might be some other planet where gravity is not the same).

The question is this: How do you determine whether or not the portal has also shrunk you in addition to teleporting you? As far as you know, this world could be “inhabited by giants” because the portal simply scales down anything that goes through it. Assuming that you can’t just measure how many atoms long something is, what’s some physical property you could measure objectively that is not dependent on scale? One where performing the test while shrunk, even if the equipment is shrunk, produces a different result due to being shrunk.


 Are we going to write a story where someone uses the answer to this question as some JoJo-esque pseudoscience bullshit to test whether or not they’re shrunk? Maybe. But if we did, we’d wait until everybody forgets we ever asked this :3

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in reply to @MagicScarf's post:

MrDrugs69
@MrDrugs69

It depends a bit on how much you shrank, but off the top of my head:

  • water surface tension is going to seem drastically different at very small scales. Liquid water is liquid water no matter where you are, but it will appear to form much bigger droplets if you're suddenly 1cm tall or something.
  • maybe heat transfer? If you can construct something similar to an electric stove's heating element (but straight, so you can accurately measure distance), the amount of time it takes to heat up would be both visible to the naked eye and much faster if you're tiny. You could probably apply this to a mercury thermometer, too.

You'd need fairly precise instruments for the second one, but surface tension ought to be observable to the naked eye near any source of water.

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cassia
@cassia

If you shrunk down enough you'd probably just die, honestly. From pressure to capillaries to thin film effects to peristalsis to alveoli, humans are meant to be human sized. So I guess in a certain sense that puts a lower bound on how small you can be shrunk and still ask, "was I shrunk?"

...but that lower bound is pretty low. After all, babies make it through somehow.

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MagicScarf
@MagicScarf

Oh that’s a good point about babies. Interesting


Anyways as long as there’s magic you can probably just be infinite small because fuck science at that point lol the atoms are just smaller now :) wdym “that doesn’t make sense” it’s magic

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FaeAlchemist
@FaeAlchemist

Depending on the zpezificz of "atomz are ztill atomz", the zize differenze could mean the air iz entirely incompatible with breathing. And figzing that zeemz to our untrained perzpective to be a whole can of wormz in itz own right... Probably bezt juzt ignore that izzue rather than addrezz it...
—🍯

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plasmon
@plasmon

The quick and dirty way would be to take mass measurements—if you weigh roughly the same as you did when you entered the new world, then you're more than likely the same size. This could be accomplished with springs or a reasonably small scale.

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plasmon
@plasmon

Hm, that's true.

Provided that all the physics in this new world is the exact same as you're used to it, meaning that all the main constants are the same, would be to do some really precise chronometry. Controlling for time, which you could do with a precise atomic clock—perhaps on loan the giant people—you can then put a light source (e.g. a laser or single photon source) at either the soles of your feet or the top of your head, and a photodetector at the other end. Once you have set up the photon source and detector, you can then measure the amount of time it takes light to travel from the source to the detector, enabling you to accurately measure your true height (height=ct, basically).

Sorry if that was incoherent or there were any typos, I've been running on like 3 hours of sleep all day haha.

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