Another quiet summer afternoon in the office. As I’m finishing up some paperwork I hear a fizzing sound I’d not heard in a while. “Hello, Anne, welcome back. Where’ve you been?”

Her white satin looks a bit speckled somehow but her voice still sounds like molten silver. “I’m not sure, Sy. That’s what I’ve come to you about.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, after we figured out that I can sort of ‘push’ myself across time and probability variation I realized that the different ‘pushes’ felt like different directions, kind of. When I go backward and forward in time it feels a little like falling backward or forward. Not really, but that’s the best way I can describe it. Moving to a different probability is a little like going left or right. So I wondered, what about up and down?”

“And I gather you tried that.”

“Sure, why not? What good’s a superpower if you don’t know what you can do with it? When I ‘push’ just a little upward thIS HAPPENS.”

“Whoa, watch out for the ceiling fan! Shrink back down again before you break the furniture or something.”

“Oh, I won’t, I’ve learned to be careful when I resize. Good thing I was outside and all by myself the first time I tried it. Took some practice to control how how much my size changes by how light or heavy I ‘pushed’.”

“I think I can see where this is going.”

“Mm-hm, it’s good to know what the limits are, right? I’ve got a pretty good idea of what would happen if I got huge. What I want to know is, what’ll I be getting into if I try ‘pushing’ down as hard as I can?”

“Kinda depends on how far down you go. I’m assuming your retinas scale their sensitivity with your size. When you get bigger do green things look blue and yellow things look green and so forth?”

“Yeah, orange juice had this weird yellow color. Tasted OK, though.”

“Right. So when you get smaller the colors you perceive will shift the other way, to shorter wavelengths — at first, yellow things will look red, blue things will look yellow and you’ll see ultraviolet as blue. When you get a thousand times smaller than normal, most things will look black because there’s not much X-ray illumination unless you’re close to a badly-shielded Crookes tube.”

“Good thing this ‘push’ ability also gave me some kind of extra feel-sense that’s not sight. Sometimes when I try to ‘push’ it ‘feels’ blocked until I move around a little. After the ‘push’ I see a wall or something I would have jumped into.”

“That’s a relief. I was wondering how you’d navigate when you’re a million times smaller than normal, at the single-cell level, or a million times smaller than that when you’d be atom-sized.”

“Then what comes?”

“Mmm… one more factor of a thousand would get you down to about the size of an atomic nucleus, but below that things get real fuzzy. It’s hard to get experimental data in the sub-nuclear size range because any photon with a wavelength that short is essentially an extremely-high-energy gamma ray, better at blowing nuclei apart than measuring them. Theory says you’d encounter nuclei as roiling balls of protons and neutrons, but each of those is a trio of quarks which may or may not be composed of even smaller things.”

“Is that the end of small?”

“Maybe not. Some physicists think space is quantized at scales near 10^—35 meter. If they’re wrong then there’s no end.”

“Quantized?”

“Quantized means something is measured out in whole numbers. Electric charge is quantized, for instance, because you can have one electron, two electrons, and so on, but you can’t have 1½ electrons. Some physicists think it’s possible that space itself is quantized. The basic idea is to somehow label each point in space with its own set of whole numbers.  There’d be no vacant space between points, just like there’s no whole number between two adjacent whole numbers.”

“So how small can I get?”

“Darned if I know.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Thanks to Jerry Mirelli for his thoughts that inspired this post and the next.