The Science of Ant-Man

Just a quick warning: this article will contain some spoilers so if you really want to see the film (and why wouldn’t you?) and for some reason haven’t seen it yet just be aware some plot points may be revealed.

When you become a physics student a lot of stereotypes get thrust upon you. Among the many interesting, funny and just plain stupid, I fit into the category of comic book lovers. As you can imagine because of this I get filled with huge amounts of excitement every time a new MARVEL film comes out.

Four Forces 2: The Electrostatic Force

So by now you should be pretty clued up on the most basic of the four fundamental forces; gravity (If you missed the article about gravity click here to read it).

But what about the other 3 fundamental forces? The second fundamental force is the electrostatic force, and it’s very similar to gravity.

Four Forces 1: Gravity

Our universe is governed by 4 fundamental forces, each as important as the others. Without them the universe as we know it would completely disintegrate around us leaving a soup of pointless particles.

(If you’re unsure of what forces are and how they work you can check out my article on Newton’s laws of motion here.)

But what are these forces, what do they do and what do they want? Don’t you worry, I’ve done the research so you don’t have to! In this series of articles (Four Forces) I’ll be answering those questions for you.

So without any further ado here is the first force: gravity!

Use the force, Newton!

A lot of people, when they hear the name Isaac Newton, think of some British bloke with funny hair who invented gravity. I mean they’re not wrong; he is a British bloke with funny hair but by no means did he invent gravity! If gravity had only been invented in the 1600s everything would just sort of be all detached, floating around in space and we wouldn’t even have had a 17th century at all.

He did, however, start to think about what the hell gravity was after an apple fell on his head from a tree in his garden. Bearing in mind that in the 1600s most people wouldn’t have questioned it and instead written a poem or a piece of music about the incident, so this was some pretty revolutionary thinking.