Since body heat production is at least partially proportionate to volume, while heat loss is dependent on surface area exposed to the air, a shrunk human will find they are dissipating heat faster than their body produces it. However, don't think this is all win for the Incredible Shrinking Man, who will likely not survive to enjoy his newfound strength. This is why small animals, like ants, are able to carry things far heavier than themselves, part of how fleas can manage to jump so far relative to their size, and why cats can survive falls of effectively any height - get small enough and your terminal velocity will be a survivable speed. Make something half its size and it will have roughly twice the proportional strength and endurance. This law is relevant when an object is shrunk down as well. The same goes for most machinery.īuoyancy in general, whether it be in the air or in the water, is an easy way to minimize the limitations of the square-cube law when increasing size, because buoyancy is dependent on density, not mass. And Newton's famous Second Law (the "force = mass × acceleration" one) means that if you double a critter's height while keeping it the same shape, you end up with four times the muscle power moving eight times the mass, so instead of having the same relative agility as the original, the double-sized creature actually has only half. The point of this law is that with living beings, strength is (more or less) a function of area (the strength of a muscle or bone is proportional to the area of its cross-section, not to its total volume), but weight is a function of volume.
When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier and its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier.įor example, if you double the size (measured by edge length) of a cube, its surface area is quadrupled, and its volume is increased to eight times its original volume. A scientific principle often ignored in media:
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