
If you enjoy watching the Ant-Man Marvel movies, you'll know the hero's special ability includes shrinking large objects down to a minute scale. In one movie, he reduces an 10-storey office block to the size of a milk crate then makes it grow again.
The amount of air that would be shunted when something that big suddenly changes size is huge. In the building example, Wired Magazine estimates the volume would be in the order of 64,000 cubic metres.
Ant-Man's apparently simple trick would easily be enough to cause a substantial explosion, flattening everything in the vicinity.
In other words, it's equivalent to detonating a large quantity of TNT.
How much TNT is a difficult question beyond the resources of this column however we can draw some parallels.
When liquid nitrogen expands into a gas, for example, the volume grows by a factor of 696.
When a gram of TNT detonates, it expands to roughly 1 litre, however the calculation is not simple because the rate of expansion - of the explosion - is a critical factor. A further complication is the nature of the surrounding material - whether the blast is affected by surrounding buildings and so on.
Enthusiastic readers can look up 'Brode's equation' which is used to determine the energy of an explosion.
Then the awkward question arises of what happens to the mass of the building. If the original building weighed 16 million kilograms imagine how Ant-Man could wheel the building around on a trolley.
You could say, of course, that we are talking about a superhero and we shouldn't ask too many questions about the physical strength of the characters.
That's a reasonable approach which unfortunately doesn't answer the question of why the trolley is strong enough, or why the now incredibly dense building doesn't simply sink into the ground. Or whether the compression of material like this would be enough to trigger nuclear fusion, causing a blast of radiation that would kill anybody nearby.
Then we could think (or perhaps over-think) about what would happen if we shrank ourselves down to the size of an insect. All sorts of strange things happen because at that scale the world is very different.
That might be a question for a future Ask Fuzzy.
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