Ant-Man and the Quantum Realm

Having written about Ant-Man and the implications of resizing in chemistry (here and here), re-watching the first Ant-Man and Captain America: Civil War movies in preparation for Avengers: Infinity War, I was very much looking forward to Ant-Man and the Wasp. I particularly like this version of the poster advertising the movie shown below.

The movie mentions the word quantum a lot. One character in the movie even comments that the nerdy folks just seem to stick the word quantum in front of everything. Being an active quantum mechanic who has just watched the movie, here are my biased opinions.

WARNING – SPOILERS AHEAD

First, it’s a fun and lighthearted movie. The storyline isn’t the most compelling, but the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there are plenty of humorous bits – Michael Peña and Randall Park are superb! I thought the special effects were a strength of the movie, and the smooth weaving of objects resizing in the action sequences was excellent. While I was hoping to learn more about the Pym particle and the mechanics of resizing, I was not expecting it in the movie. The Marvel Cinematic Universe tends to have the best science-y bits in their opening movies (the first Iron Man is a quintessential example), and sequels tend to focus more on wowing the audience with action and visuals.

I was excited that there would be more travel into the quantum realm, but I was unimpressed with what that revealed. Nebulous shapes with some ethereal quality seemed to be the backdrop. There was some attempt to convey ‘fluctuations’ in the quantum realm, but overall it was more like being in a psychedelic amorphous dream world. Maybe that’s what the quantum realm should be like, but this felt much more doped-up artistic expression than making use of what we know from science. The pre-quantum world with good old hardy tardigrades was more impressive than the actual quantum realm. (This tardigrade picture comes from a UCSB outer space research group!)

The movie centers around the building of a quantum tunnel. In the movie, this means a tunnel connecting the macroscopic world with the quantum realm. To a quantum mechanic, the phrase quantum tunneling means something very different – it’s how quantum particles can seemingly pass through ‘classical’ energy barriers without having the energy to go over them. (Picture below from an OER ChemLibre text.) The tunnel in the movie was more like a contraption you might imagine in high energy physics where instability can cause the ‘reactor’ to explode and splatting everyone with high energy particles (radiation). In the movie these are quantum particles, but that’s yet another example of tacking on the word quantum to everything.

What I thought was more interesting, and possibly relevant to the quantum realm, was the phasing abilities of the character Ava Starr, nicknamed Ghost. Walking through walls and passing your hands through matter are illustrations of quantum tunneling. It’s unclear why Ghost always has her feet on the ground and she never tunnels through the ‘floor’, but I suppose that might make the running and fighting sequences more complicated and possibly less exciting. It’s too bad that the qualities of the suit, allowing Ghost to control the phasing, are not described. Now that would be interesting to a quantum mechanic. Maybe a future spin-off will delve into it? One can only hope.

Quantum entanglement is the other interesting premise of the movie. How this is weaved into the story: when Scott Lang visits the quantum realm in the first Ant-Man movie, he is somehow able to get quantum entangled with Janet van Dyne. This allows Janet, in the present movie, first to communicate with Scott in a dream – and then later, in a weird sequence, she actually takes over his consciousness. Presumably the ‘quantum energy’ she has accumulated, and her study of it while being stuck in the quantum realm for decades, allows her to manipulate what I will facetiously call quantum power. It can even be used to heal Ghost, as we see towards the end of the movie.

While quantum gets used and misused a lot in the movie, I might be able to take advantage of this by referencing the movie in my Quantum Chemistry class this coming Fall. Come to think of it, maybe I should e-mail the students ahead of time and recommend they watch the movie while it is still playing in cinemas.