Honey, I Broke the Physics

I put Honey, I Shrunk the Kids up on the big screen at work today, then spent about 20 minutes re-researching thr fundamental forces of nature to try and work out how Szalinski's shrink ray operates.

By his own words—either in this film or the first sequel, I forget which—Szalinski states the machine works to reduce the great amount of empty space in what is typically considered "solid" matter.

To achieve this, the device would have to affective lot lessen the coefficient of the Weak Nuclear Force, which governs the behavior of fermions such as electrons. This would allow them to maintain stable orbits far closer to the nucleus of their atoms, thereby allowing molecular bonds to be formed from atoms functionally "smaller" in so far as each atom would now occupy less volumethan previously.

Now, Szalinski says nothing of changing any mass, however it is quite clear from the experimental results that weight has been scaled down proportionately with volume of the shrunken subjects, so it can only be that mass too has been affected. This requires that the machine also interact with the Higgs Field in such a way as to shift down the subject's mass as they shrink.


Notes:

1) Altering the coefficients of the fundamental forces is completely impossible and would likely break physics within the space provided, killing anything within, probably horribly.

2) There isn't actually any "empty space" in an atom to remove. I mean you can't remove a nothing, but the emptiness is really teaming with quantum foam if virtual particles infinitely coming into and out of existence, powering the dark energies and probabilities of the world.