Small

Small is a direction of the dimension/spectrum of size; opposite of large.

• All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite.
  • Anaxagoras, Frag. B 1 from Early Greek Philosophy, Chapter 6, John Burnet (1920).
• In Sorbière's day, European thinkers and intellectuals of widely divergent religious and political affiliations campaigned tirelessly to stamp out the doctrine of indivisibles and to eliminate it from philosophical and scientific consideration. In the very years that Hobbes was fighting Wallis over the indivisible line in England, the Society of Jesus was leading its own campaign against the infinitely small in Catholic lands. In France, Hobbes's acquaintance René Descartes, who had initially shown considerable interest in infinitesimals, changed his mind and banned the concept.. Even as late as the 1730s... George Berkeley mocked mathematicians for their use of infinitesimals... Lined up against these naysayers were some of the most prominent mathematicians and philosophers of that era, who championed the use of the infinitesimally small. These included, in addition to Wallis: Galileo and his followers, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, and Isaac Newton.
  • Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (2014)

• When the Incredible Shrinking Man stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He's clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.

Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he's going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he'll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He'll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).

Because of these relatively larger surface areas, he'll be losing water at a proportionally larger rate, so he'll have to drink a lot, too. We see him drink once in the movie--he dips his hand into a puddle and sips from his cupped palm. The image is unremarkable and natural, but unfortunately wrong for his dimensions: at his size surface tension becomes a force comparable to gravity. More likely, he'd immerse his hand in the pool and withdraw it coated with a drop of water the size of his head. When he put his lips to the drop, the surface tension would force the drop down his throat whether or not he chooses to swallow.

As for the contest with the spider, the battle is indeed biased, but not the way the movie would have you believe. Certainly the spider has a wicked set of poison fangs and some advantage because it wears its skeleton on the outside, where it can function as armor. But our hero, because of his increased metabolic rate, will be bouncing around like a mouse on amphetamines. He wouldn't struggle to lift the sewing needle--he'd wield it like a rapier because his relative strength has increased about 70 fold. The forces that a muscle can produce are proportional to its cross-sectional area (length squared), while body mass is proportional to volume (length cubed). The ratio of an animal's ability to generate force to its body mass scales approximately as 1/length; smaller animals are proportionally stronger. This geometric truth explains why an ant can famously life 50 times its body weight, while we can barely get the groceries up the stairs; were we the size of ants, we could lift 50 times our body weight, too. As for the Shrinking Man, pity the poor spider.

Understanding scale is key to the problems raised in another classic of life on the small side. Dr. Cyclops (1940) is a tale of a mad scientist who retires to a remote island to perfect his secret machine, a device that emits atomic rays (five years before the bomb!), shrinking anything in their path. When his solitude is disturbed by interlopers (I'm convinced he mistook them for a granting agency's site-inspection team), he shrinks them; the rest of the movie follows the battles between the giant doctor and his miniaturized visitors.

Much of the movie is taken up with the Lilliputian team struggling to climb up onto pieces of furniture and then back down again. For the latter, they need not have invested so much time and effort in securing pieces of string to use as ropes: they could simply have jumped. When any object falls, it accelerates until the drag force equals the force generated by gravity acting on its mass; from then on, the velocity is constant. This speed is known as the "terminal velocity"; for a full-sized human it's about 120 mph and is very terminal indeed. However, the drag on an object is proportional to its cross-sectional area, while the force due to gravity is proportional to its mass (and thus volume, if density is constant). As objects get smaller, gravitational pull decreases more rapidly than drag, so terminal velocity decreases.

• Michael C. LaBarbera [1]

• I am something of an amateur gynecologist. I have been known to utilize a speculum now and again. The female body, as a functional instrument, obsesses me. If I were on the Enterprise's holodeck . . . My greatest fantasy is to be with that fifty-foot woman from those schmaltzy 1950s sci-fi films. That would be the ultimate: to actually crawl up the vagina.
  • Brannon Braga - from Jeff Greenwald's Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth (1998), pgs. 55-56.

• I never liked big girls, and I like them even less now. If I'd still wanted to, I suppose I could have embraced Liala. But I'd have looked like such a fool, standing there on tip toe with my arms wrapped around her knees.
  • Arthur C. Clarke Cosmic Cassnova

• Yoda: Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
  • The Empire Strikes Back, screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan

• Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, 'and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

• Doctor: Adelaide, I've done this sort of thing before. In small ways, saved some little people, but never someone as important as you. Oh, I'm good.

Adelaide: Little people? What, like Mia and Yuri? Who decides they're so unimportant? You?

• Doctor Who, The Waters of Mars, written by Russell T. Davies and Phil Ford.

• Dr. Charles Dutton: I'm glad you're amused gentlemen, but it might just turn out to be true. During this symposium, we'll discuss the possibility that intelligent life on a distant planet may be no

Dr. Charles Dutton: Perhaps no larger than... a bacterium.

• The Andromeda Strain (film) screenplay by Nelson Gidding

• You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
  • J.B.S. Haldane On Being the Right Size

• On a recent Sunday evening, Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small."
  • Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005), at page 34

• A very small event in the microbial community can have an enormous impact on the environment.

• [Daniel Rothman][2]

• Honey, I shrunk the kids.
  • Wayne Szalinski Honey I blew up the Kid Screenplay by Garry Goodrow, Thom Eberhardt and Peter Elbling

• You humans, when're you gonna learn that size doesn't matter? Just 'cause something's important, doesn't mean it's not very, very small.
  • Frank the Pug Men in Black written by Ed Solomon

• Abraham Van Helsing: Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!
  • Dracula by Bram Stoker

• Power can be held in the smallest of things...
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (film) written by Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson.