Sciencey Wiencey: Into the Dalek

Guest contributor Caleb Howells investigates more Doctor Who science and plausibilities.

This episode was a particularly ‘science-fictiony’ one. It had miniaturisation, vaporisation, lasers, spaceships, and explosions! Everything that a good science-fiction show should have. But just how much of it was based in science-fact? For example, the major ‘scientific’ plot point was the fact that the Doctor and co. were miniaturised. But is that really plausible? Let’s take a look.

There are only a couple of potential ways that one could try this. One way is by removing ‘unnecessary’ atoms from the body. The problem with this, however, is that even if that were possible for a little bit, you certainly wouldn’t be able to scale things down to the size presented in the episode. The functionality would be lost. Intelligence isn’t related to brain size anywhere near as much as most people think, but you definitely couldn’t have a brain a little larger than a pin head and expect to still have human-level intelligence.

So regardless of the practicality of removing specific atoms from the body (which I’m not going to get into), that alone makes this an unviable option.

The other option is to reduce the size of the atoms themselves. After all, an atom is mostly empty space. Taking that at face value, the functionality of everything would presumably still work. However, the obvious question is whether or not you can actually do that. With a regular atom… no, you can’t. Electrons fill the lowest energy orbital first, meaning that they’re already as close to the nucleus as they can be.

However, there is a different type of particle that we could use. Muons. These are like electrons, but about 200 times heavier. Because of this, they orbit much closer to the nucleus. If you were to replace all the atoms in someone’s body with otherwise identical muonic atoms (and if you could automatically push the atoms closer together to fill up the space created by them shrinking), then presumably you would end up with a smaller person.

But of course, there are problems with this. Firstly, I haven’t been able to find out just how much smaller it would make the atom (and therefore the person). If anyone reading this could shed some light on the matter in the comments, I’m sure we would all appreciate it. But more significantly, the muons decay into electrons and neutrinos in a matter of microseconds. A tad too fast to execute a mission into a malfunctioning Dalek. Also, replacing electrons with muons would certainly create a whole host of side effects that I have neither the time nor the information to include here.

Unfortunately, miniaturisation just isn’t a feasible idea. There’s also the interesting issue of the different effects the environment would have on you if you were that small. For example, a drop of water isn’t really that small. You can clearly see them with the naked eye, so imagine a drop of water 70 times as large as normal. That’s a seriously massive lump of water held together by surface tension. In fact, it would be amazing to see the effects of surface tension scaled up, so it’s a bit disappointing that the episode didn’t incorporate that (such as in the scene when the characters fall into the container of that strange liquid).

But in any case, the point is that there are a lot of effects that you would encounter if you were shrunk down to that size. I dare say it’s not a very good idea, so don’t go around trying it.

Catch-up on other articles in this series:

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