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{{trope|wppage=Square-cube law}}
[[File:
{{quote|''The bigger they are, the harder they fall.''
A scientific principle often ignored in media:
{{quote|''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.''}}
For example, if you double the size (measured by edge length) of a cube, its surface area is quadrupled, and its volume is increased by ''eight times''.
The point of this law is that with living beings, strength is (more or less) a function of ''area'',<ref>(the strength of a muscle or bone is proportional to the area of its cross-section, not to its total volume)</ref>
This applies to flyers as well: [[Giant Flyer|Double the size]], and you get four times the wingpower attempting to keep eight times the weight airborne, so the creature's ability to fly has actually been cut by half.
On the other hand, the buoyancy of aquatic swimmers is completely unaffected by the law because it's a function of
A full explanation is a lot more complicated due to subtler biological factors (muscle/bone stress, required oxygen uptake, dissipating body heat, etc.), the gist of it is the same in every case: You can't just scale something up (or down) to a different size and expect it to still work the same way as it used to.
The law is not limited to living creatures, but applies to ''anything'' with mass (and, well, everything has mass): A skyscraper twice as wide and tall as another will have eight times the weight, and require a far stronger support
Knowing that audiences are becoming more savvy about this as compared to the days when [[Attack of the 50
See [[Attack of the 50
{{examples}}
== [[Anime]]
* The ''[[
** Lampshaded in Trunks and Cell's fight; the more Trunks powers up, the more he bulks up, but he loses speed and agility.
** This, of course, is overcome when Super Saiyan 2 form is reached, where strength and speed seemingly increase proportionally.
* ''[[Full Metal Panic!]]'' [[Lampshade Hanging|Hangs a Lampshade]] on this fact; although it glosses over the existence of relatively small [[Humongous Mecha]], an extremely huge example appears on the villains' side in one episode, and accordingly a character points out that it ought to collapse under its own weight. When the particular bit of [[Applied Phlebotinum]] which prevents this is destroyed, it indeed does so.
** Bonus points for the mecha not simply falling over; rather, its legs rupture and collapse outwards under the weight.
* [[Yoshiyuki Tomino]] originally wanted to avoid this in ''[[
** ''[[
** Later ''[[
** ''[[
* Mentioned briefly by Koizumi in ''[[
* Justified in ''[[Cannon God Exaxxion]]'', where the titular colossus has a gravity control device powered by Antimatter. It also addresses the problem of weight distribution on the feet by replacing them with invisible forcefields that distribute the machine's (still considerable, even when mitigated by gravity control) weight over a wider area, which has the unfortunate side-effect of flattening innocent bystanders who are dozens of feet away from the mech itself.
* Another [[Humongous Mecha]] series that avoids this problem is ''[[Mars Daybreak|Kenran Butousai]]'', which takes place on a [[
* On the subject of mecha anime, ''New [[Getter Robo]]'' hangs a lampshade in the final episode. When the final boss grows into a planet-sized form, Hayato and Benkei respond:
{{quote|
'''Hayato:''' No way. At that size, it should be collapsing from the sheer pressure of its own weight! }}
* Lampshaded in ''[[
** Towards the end of the series, {{spoiler|that same engineer manages to pull it off. Though this version is at least slightly more plausible, as it's not humanoid, but rather something that looks like a cross between a frog and a chicken with the legs connected at the sides for better weight distribution. The robot is also primarily remote controlled, since, while it does have a cockpit inside, operating it manually is rendered nearly impossible due to severe motion sickness induced by its uneven gait}}.
* ''[[Giant Robo]]: Ginrei Special'' has one robot whose weight was 2/3 armor, and needed to use its [[Jet Pack]] just to stay standing up.
* Mentioned and [http://www.mangafox.com/manga/franken_fran/v03/c017/10.html briefly explained] by [[Franken Fran|Fran]], when she witnesses the [[Attack of the 50
* ''[[Gyo]]'' obeys the
* Acknowledged/lampshaded in ''[[Patlabor]]'': Humanoid-style [[Humongous Mecha|labors]] tend to be made with very large feet and small torsos. This trope is mentioned to a certain extent early in the TV series when Kanuka puts a labor through a bunch of stock action movie moves (jumping, flipping, etc). Noa asks Asuma why he's wincing, and he explains that while the new police labor model (the Ingram AVS-98) is technically capable of performing any motion that a human body can (with regards to degrees of freedom), it can't really take much more punishment than standard walking without requiring pretty serious maintenence, and implies that Kanuka's short perfomance will mean days of work and hundreds (possibly thousands) of dollars in components to bring the labor back to 100% operating capacity.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* Superheroes like, say, Ant Man, usually don't even bother [[Hand Wave|giving this a wave]]. When shrinking, Ant Man maintains the strength of a regular human despite his size, and when growing, his size is "Proportionate" ([[Strong
** A note should be made about the new Ant Man (Eric O'Grady): he does try to take advantage of his proportionate strength to punch out a guy (to impress a woman), but doesn't realize that his punch is more like a bullet than a hammer.
** Lampshaded in an issue of ''[[Blue Beetle]]''. When Giganta attacks El Paso, Peacemaker talks about how her growth [[A Wizard Did It|has to be magical]] to avoid breaking the Square Cube Law, and drops hints about a science-induced growth experiment that... didn't go well.
** [[Marvel Comics]] heroes use "Pym particles" to grow and shrink, so there's an extra layer of [[Phlebotinum]] keeping it working. DC's The Atom, on the other hand, knows that shrinking is
*** In a Marvel ''[[What If]]?'' comic featuring a Soviet [[Fantastic Four]], Pym (fighting for the USA) died from suffocation when [[Reed Richards Is Useless|Reed]] forced him to grow, rendering his lungs incapable of supplying enough oxygen to sustain him. Reed did this in an attempt to incapacitate him [[For Science!|without considering the consequences]], and afterward he was [[What Have I Done|horrified by what he'd done]].
** In Hank Pym's first appearance as Giant-Man, [[Marvel Comics]] played the Law quite
** [[The Ultimates]] version of Hank Pym can grow to ''just'' under sixty feet, as according to his wife,
** Given a nod in the original ''[[Guardians of the Galaxy]]''.
** The ''[[Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe]]'' (usually the best authority on how superpowers in Marvel work, though that isn't saying much) often claims that characters who shapeshift or change size do so by "drawing mass from another, possibly extradimensional source", although they never attempt to explain the nature of this other dimension.
* [[Spider-Man]] writers occasionally lampshade this, and there has been at least one [[Retcon]] that Spidey is actually ''stronger'' than the proportionate strength of a
**
* The Hulk is known to get stronger and larger as he gets angrier (maximum height is roughly twelve feet); this might be justified, though, as his relative muscle (and presumably bone) mass increases as well as his height. Furthermore, Hulk is generally not depicted as merely scaling up; in most depictions, the cross-sections of his arms and legs increase out of proportion, which would balance things out some.
** It's been implied that he draws his strength from outside of his own body, and therefore muscle mass would be irrelevant.
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* Lampshaded in ''[[Atomic Robo]]'', where the presence of giant ants has pretty much everyone pointing out that they should be crushed by their own weight, and the only one that doesn't say it's impossible is the guy that thinks it's covered by "imaginary physics" and "imaginary radiation", which would give them [[Eye Beams|laser eyes]].
** A giant monster attack in Volume 4 has Robo ask "Why do we even ''have'' the Square Cube Law!?"
* An interesting inversion appears in ''[[
** When she's forced into [[Phlebotinum Overload]], she becomes so dense that she can't move and can barely speak.
* Likewise, one of the the ''[[Power Pack]]'' kids ([[Powers
* A plot point in one ''[[Fantastic Four]]'' story; Reed Richards encounters an alien able to [[Feed It
* The ''[[Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe]]'' tried to be scientifically accurate, so it constantly faced this problem, handwaving them away with references to anti-gravitons or similar technobabble that at least suggests that some writer is ''aware'' that there's a scientific problem.
* In one issue of ''[[Nodwick]]'', this law is specifically addressed by a potion intended to grow people to giant size; specifically, it ''doesn't'' increase mass, and as such the 'inability to support own weight' point is moot. Of course, some other problems, like how a fifty-foot tall being weighing one hundred pounds reacts when being exposed to an ambient breeze, immediately present themselves.
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* Discussed in great detail in ''The Science Of Superheroes'', with regards to superheroes that are able to make themselves larger or smaller.
* Discussed in the ''[[
▲== Fan Works ==
* Lampshaded and handwaved in ''[[Nobody Dies]]''; it's quoted in dialog between two subordinate scientists that they can never get Yui to explain why the Evas don't sink into the ground due to their weight, and the current dominant theory is that the ground is [[Person of Mass Destruction|too scared of them]] to let them in.▼
▲* Discussed in the ''[[Deva Series (Fanfic)|Deva Series]]'', where it is noted that the Seed can't get much bigger without magical assistance if they want to maintain their power. And since one of their key gimmicks is [[Anti Magic]] protection...
* An issue of scientific scrutiny in [[The Teraverse]] in the wake of assorted giant monsters (such as a [[Giant Spider|multi-hundred-foot-tall tarantula]]) that by all rights should not be able to support their own weight.
▲* Lampshaded and handwaved in [[Nobody Dies]]; it's quoted in dialog between two subordinate scientists that they can never get Yui to explain why the Evas don't sink into the ground due to their weight, and the current dominant theory is that the ground is [[Person of Mass Destruction|too scared of them]] to let them in.
== [[Film]] ==
* Actually [[Hand Wave|hand waved]] in ''[[Monsters Versus Aliens]]'', the [[Attack of the 50
* ''[[Avatar (
** Said [[Humongous Mecha]] were designed for use on Earth - Pandora's lower gravity is what makes them viable in hand-to-hand combat with the natives.
* Subtle aversion in ''[[Transformers (
** The same aversion is seen with the other robots in both films. Smaller guys like Bumblebee or Barricade are pretty agile, while the medium size bots like Ironhide can move, but they aren't that swift. Moving up to Optimus Prime and Megatron, they're clearly focused on power brawling, although Optimus is a [[Lightning Bruiser]].
** In the live-action movie, in truck mode, Optimus became a conventional tractor (one with a hood) instead of his original cab-over design, to give him enough extra mass to get to 30 feet tall when in robot mode, rather than 25 feet like the other Autobots.
* Giant cockroach movie ''[[Mimic]]'' [[Hand Wave|hand waves]] the
* In ''[[
* ''[[
== [[Literature]] ==
* The dragon species created in ''[[Duumvirate]]'' has wings in its juvenile stage, but loses its ability to fly as it grows up.
* ''[[Discworld]]'':
** Mentioned in ''[[
** In ''[[
** Discworld's gnomes are also terrifyingly strong, despite being six inches tall, and able to knock a man out and break bones with a headbutt or otherwise
*** Said gnomes ''also'' possess all of a grown man's bad temper concentrated into that same space, which makes the above acts of violence not only ''possible'' but also fairly ''probable''.
* Justified in the ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' novel ''Ragnarok'', where Chakotay explicitly notes that the creatures in question [[Hand Wave|must have evolved in a low-gravity environment]].
* Made a plot point in the ''[[City of Heroes]]'' book "The Web of Arachnos". {{spoiler|The massive army of robots are defeated when they're unable to do things the smaller bots were able to do due to their size, which leads one of the two creators to yell at the other for forgetting the Square-Cubed law and going for Rule of Cool/Intimidating over practical.}}
* Noted in ''[[The BFG]]'': a cook scales up a meal to the giant's scale based on his height, rather than his mass. The giant is not impressed.
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* In [[Stan Lee]]'s ''Riftworld!'', the giants are supported by a telekinetic field, which has the side benefit of making them [[Immune to Bullets]].
* A plot point in ''[[Danny Dunn And The Smallifying Machine]]''. In learning to walk at 1/4 inch high, the accidentally-shrunken characters have difficulty adjusting to their reduced weight; falling, they hit the (much closer) ground almost before they've realized they've tripped, but suffer no injuries due to lack of mass. Difficulty coping with the surface tension of water is also addressed.
* This trope originally bit [[David Weber]] on the butt, with the ''[[
* In [[Orson Scott Card]]'s ''Shadow'' series, Bean has a genetic disorder that causes his brain to continue growing as an infant's does, giving him extreme intelligence, at the cost of causing his body to continue growing as well, leading to a projected lifespan of about eighteen years. {{spoiler|Since the problem is caused by gravity, he eventually leaves in a relativistic spacecraft with controllable gravity, so that he can possibly survive until a cure is found.}}
* In one of the ''[[I Was a Sixth Grade Alien]]'' books the characters are shrunk to about seven inches and quickly discover that this has not affected their strength or mass after trying to get off a desk they attempt jumping down onto a open drawer and snap right through it.
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** Likewise, ''[[Its All There in the Manual|The Dragonlover's Guide To Pern]]'' shows that the skeletal structure of a dragon is very different from any Terran animal's. The desgin looks like it allows for a greater distribution of weight.
* Deliberately used in ''[[The Dresden Files]]'' novel ''Small Favor'', where Harry is fighting a twenty-foot-tall fairie hitman with a car-sized sword, battle armor, and hefty anti-magic defenses. He manages to get said hitman chasing him over a patch of waxed floor and changes direction, causing the faerie to fall over and mangle himself in the impact. He's not overwhelmingly injured (being a [[The Fair Folk|faerie]] and thus very resistant) but it ''smarts'' like hell.
* Addressed in the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' books with Rubeus Hagrid - he is a half-giant, quoted to be two times as tall as a regular man and nearly ''five'' times as wide, having the weight of 1,000 to 1,500 pounds. If you try to be as large as a Kodiak bear raised on the hind legs, having the body structure (and presumably the muscular strength) of a Kodiak bear helps a lot. Even better when your 7 days a week job is mostly physical labor around Hogwarts' lands.
** In the movies, however, they aimed for a height of 8'6" (about 259
* In ''There Is No Darkness'', the protagonist is an enhanced
* In his novella ''The Forgotten Planet,'' Murray Leinster plays this very straight in his presentation of a world in which insects have grown to enormous sizes, such as ants two feet long and spiders with yard-long legs, based on fossil records of actually giant insects, and are at the outer limit of what cube-square effects allow. But other insects, such as water striders, are no larger than normal, as gigantism would destroy them.
** It's [[Word of God|explicitly said]] the gigantic size of the insects was due to a specific combination of factors which had to match exactly for them to evolve: atmosphere very humid and very rich in oxygen, thick clouds keeping constant warmth via greenhouse effect, huge quantities of nutrients available due to gigantic sizes attained by fungi. The key of the heroes survival is simply climbing to a plateau with temperate climate - the mere coolness of a temperate night renders the giant insects motionless and vulnerable.
* The short story ''[[Surface Tension]]'', by James Blish, deals with a race of microscopic humanoids, and does a good job of showing physics on such a
* Immanuel Volikovsky studied ancient legends and concluded that other planets were responsible for global catastrophes here on Earth. Among other notions, Venus was once a comet ejected from Jupiter responsible for the Biblical plagues of Egypt, and Earth once orbited Saturn and the Biblical flood was caused by Saturn going nova and also ejecting Earth to its current orbit. Scientists everywhere rolled their eyes and dismissed him entirely because everything he suggested violated simple understanding of planetary physics, as well as conservation of energy and angular momentum. However, he did influence a portion of the American public, some of whom latched onto the notion that the only reason dinosaurs could exist was because of lessened gravity on Earth's surface due to the presence of Saturn in the sky. One author inspired by Volikovsky correctly stated that a human of saurian dimensions would collapse under his own weight and die, then incorrectly reasoning that dinosaurs couldn't possibly have survived. The book then goes on to have Jupiter eject a planet the size of Venus which causes ... well, the science was bad and the writing not much better.
* In ''[[Garrett
* Actually played straight in ''[[Super Sentai]]'' and by extension ''[[Power Rangers]]'', where the [[Humongous Mecha]] move like hulking slow behemoths as they should.▼
▲== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* Equally lampshaded and played straight in an episode of ''[[
▲* Actually played straight in [[Super Sentai]] and by extension [[Power Rangers]], where the [[Humongous Mecha]] move like hulking slow behemoths as they should.
* Once on ''[[
▲* Equally lampshaded and played straight in an episode of ''[[Farscape (TV)|Farscape]]''. Most of the crew are shrunk and one complains that it shouldn't be possible. Another tells her that it's better to think of a solution than to complain that what just happened isn't possible.
{{quote|
▲* Once on ''[[Myth Busters]]'', Adam was attempting to use a toy as a scale model human to test parachutes. He calculated its weight as a proportion of height and got an unreasonably large number.
▲{{quote| '''Adam:''' I'm roughly 6 feet at 180 pounds. Proportionately, that's 72 inches to 180 pounds. 10 inches tall... 25 pounds. I just did the math. I need him to weigh 25 pounds.<br />
▲'''Jamie:''' So what you're saying is, he needs to be made of depleted uranium.<br />
'''Adam:''' Uh, do you have any? (looks at labeled shelves behind him) Is it under "D" or "U"? }}
** He later realized his mistake and calculated as a ratio of volume. The irony is that this approach ''still'' doesn't work, because a parachute's effectiveness is based on its area.
** Later used correctly in the Lead Balloon myth. Adam and Jamie's small-scale lead-foil balloon didn't float up specifically ''because'' it was too small (as they explained on the show). When they scaled the balloon up to a much larger size, the ratio of volume to surface area became large enough for the balloon to
* Subverted in the ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' episode "Life Serial". In order to distract Buffy, Jonathan transforms himself into a much larger demon (that seemed to be modeled on the ''[[South Park]]'' [[Satan]]) except that as the demon he "actually had the proportional strength of, uh...me."
* Of particular note is ''[[
* [[Conversational Troping|Discussed]] on ''[[The Big Bang Theory]]'', comparing the viability of giant ants vs. giant rabbits and mice. Notably, the [http://thebigblogtheory.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/s03e19-the-wheaton-recurrence/ production blog] for the show cited this very page in explaining the problems with enlarging arthropods and mammals.
== [[Professional Wrestling]] ==
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* ''[[GURPS]]'' details the stats needed for monsters of various impossible sizes with an eye toward the Square Cube Law (''how'' the creatures can be so big is left up to the GM).
* ''[[Dungeons
** And yet, while getting it right there, completely fails to grasp it in the monster sections. Numerous monsters in the books are given proportions that indicate the world is being overrun by very scrawny ogres made of balsa wood.
** Also played somewhat straight in that a creatures lifting capacity does not typically scale directly with the creature's mass. For an 8x mass increase for an extra size category, a creature typically receives a 6x increase in carrying capacity. It gets worse when [[A Wizard Did It]], as spells such as enlarge person increase the creatures weight by the usual eight times, but only increases their carry capacity by approximately 2.6 times.
** There is an artifact in the Book Of Vile Darkness called the Despoiler of Flesh that gives you very flexible control over a creatures shape, it more or less points out that it has to be scientifically plausible or the creature will die because of an unsound anatomy.
* When RoleAids released ''Giants'', a vintage third-party D&D supplement, they took this trope into account, rationalizing giants' physiology with honeycomb-framework bones, radically different leg musculature, and super-tough hide to contain their extremely high blood pressure. Oh, and a heaping dose of [[A Wizard Did It]] (or rather The Gods Did It) for titans.
** [[Humongous Mecha]] - Imperial Titans, Gargants… Stompas at least have wide feet.
▲** And Baneblades, and Gargants, and Squiggoths, and Hive Tyrants...thanks to 40k's [[Rule of Cool]]-powered physics, it's likely cumbersome size can always be counterbalanced by the number of guns bolted to it.
** [[Military Mashup Machine|Land Battleships]] - Baneblade and its derivatives (13.5m long and 8.4m wide, it's bigger than Maus - see below)
** Giant monsters - Squiggoths, Hive Tyrants… Taken to hilarious extremes with the Hierophant Biotitan who, despite being as large as a
* ''[[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]'' fails to take this trope into account with the Garou and other shapeshifting races. A Garou's crinos form height is 150% that of their homid form height, with significantly more mass. Ironically, a Garou's dexterity ''increases'' in crinos form, when it should logically decrease.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* The giant that appears in ''[[Touhou]] 12.3: Hisoutensoku'' is repeatedly [[Lampshade Hanging|pointed out to be impossible]] due to this law. Sanae even draws comparisons to [[Humongous Mecha]] from anime. Of course, since this takes place in Gensokyo, the fact that it's impossible is a perfect justification for it showing up...
* Played with in the ''[[Mega Man (
** In the ''[[
* In ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'', huge monsters made of metal like bronze or steel are strong enough to support their own weight (which is suitably high because it is calculated by the game based on their size and material) and are extremely durable, but that same weight also makes them relatively vulnerable to damage from falls.
* [[Sapient Cetaceans|Liir]] from ''[[Sword of the Stars]]'' are technically immortal and never stop growing, resulting in their Great Elders being very large. Eventually, they grow too big and die due to gravity. {{spoiler|Suul'ka are Liir Great Elders who say "Forget this gravity junk" and teleport into space to continue their existence.}}
* Broken and lampshaded in ''Worlds of [[Ultima]]: The Savage Empire'' with the Myrmidex, a race of intelligent giant ants. As the manual says:
{{quote|
* Broken severely in ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'' with Killer Croc. His dossier says he is 11 feet tall and 580 pounds (9 feet tall and 320 pounds in [[Batman: Arkham City|the sequel]]). He should realistically weigh 3 or 4 times that.
== [[Web Original]] ==
* In ''[[Ilivais X]]'' the Ilivais units are basically 80s super robots, and as such standing under their own weight would be impossible without assistance. This developed into "make them focused on flight" which then developed into "don't even bother giving them feet". As such, most of them have blade legs that end in a point, meaning that if they lose flight capability, they're utterly incapable of movement.
* In the ''[[Whateley Universe]]'' story "Boston Brawl", there's an [[Author Tract]] explaining how size-warping 'giants' really work, since the
** The Workshop at Whateley contains a [[Humongous Mecha]] that [[Mad Scientist|devisor]] students occasionally work on. The best it's done is take three steps before the knee came apart.
** Played dead straight on occasion, too - Jimmy T's antics on Hallowe'en come to mind, as do any Shifter (as opposed to Warper) size-changers.
* Discussed extensively in ''[[Small Problem]]''.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
*
* Similarly, in ''[[Order of the Stick]]'' [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0585.html #585], Vaarsuvius attempted to use his Common Sense and knowledge of the
** Also invoked in [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0326.html #326], though not in as many words. Roy uses this law to make a hydra pass out, as its blood supply couldn't keep up with the number of heads it was growing.
* Addressed with a [[Techno Babble|technobabbly]] [[Hand Wave]] in [http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20061221.html this] installment of ''[[The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob]]''.
* Addressed and mentioned by name in ''Muertitos'' [http://muertitos.comicgenesis.com/d/20060706.html here].
* ''[[Manly Guys Doing Manly Things]]'' addresses this in one of its extras. [http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/images/scorpionfight.jpg Poor uncharacteristically adorable scorpion.]
* In [http://www.egscomics.com/?date=2012-01-23 this strip] of ''[[
* Used in [http://angryflower.com/rideli.gif this] ''[[Bob the Angry Flower]]'' strip, if not stated outright.
* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' has some huge critters on [[Big Dumb Object|Eina-Afa]]. Analysis shows they are laced with metal glasses, especially muscle and skeletal tissues, and generally contain enough metal compounds to be highly poisonous for more conventional organic lifeforms ("depending on how you like your aluminium").
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* Lampshaded on ''[[The Venture Brothers]]'' with Humonguloid, a giant with a heart condition and other severe problems. Of course, VB's science of choice being [[Weird Science|superscience]], he later gets shrunk to the size of an ant and survives for decades with no major health problems and, indeed, no medical care.
** The same character states the "proportional strength of an ant" idea to likewise be nonsense.
* On ''[[
** Of course, given how fatal [[Disney Villain Death|falling]] seems to be in Disneyverse, perhaps they are right to fear it.
* Bumblebee in ''[[Teen Titans]]''; similar to Ant-Man, she retains her full human-sized strength when she shrinks to insect-size.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* One of the classic explications of this idea, although never actually mentioning the term "square cube law", is J.B.S. Haldane's "[https://web.archive.org/web/20110822151104/http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html On Being The Right Size]".
* Some breeds of dogs which have been bred for size are easily susceptible to numerous health issues that smaller dogs do not, from joint pain to heart problems. Similarly, leaner people tend to have fewer health issues than overweight or very muscular people, because they have less weight to carry around.
* [
* [[Tear Jerker|A sad example...]] Beached whales die because their own body weight on land, without any support from water, crushes their lungs, causing compressive asphyxia (i.e. they cannot breathe under their own weight).
** Some cases of stranding have had the animals die due to drowning- their stomachs were crushed, and the animals vomited their food.
* The Nazis were getting hammered in the tank battles on the Eastern Front, so they decided to build a scaled-up tank, with armour thick enough to shrug off enemy tank shells, and guns big enough to one-shot enemy tanks. The "Maus", as it was ironically called, weighed 200 tonnes, was 10 metres long and 3.71 metres tall. The tracks were 1.1 metres wide - more than half its 3.63 metre width - in order to try to spread the load, but it still tended to sink if the ground wasn't completely firm. The designers had a difficult job designing (and then redesigning) a suspension system strong enough to support the weight, and finding an engine big enough to drive the whole thing - in the end, more than half of the Maus was occupied by powerplant and transmission, and it still wouldn't go over 13 kph. Crossing bridges with that weight was out of the question, so it was designed to be able to ford rivers, completely submerged if necessary. It was to have a 150mm main cannon. Unfortunately, they were unable to do anything about it destroying roads and damaging nearby structures simply by its weight and vibration. In the end, only two prototypes were built. That's not all, though. Plans were on the drawing board for a '''1,000 tonne''', 25 metre long Landkreutzer with a 12" main gun, infirmary and toilet facility, and its big brother, the '''1,500 tonne''', 42 metre long "Monster" Landkreutzer with a 32" inch main gun. [[Those Wacky Nazis]], indeed!
*** Interestingly, due to advancements and progresses in engineering technique and equipment (like the engines and how much power one can get out of them), the first two are likely. A handful of coal mining vehicles have definitely the weight and shape of the 1000tonner and the Maus. The only thing keeping them out of play is actually the new world's reliance on air power and mobility, fast strikes, and light compact squads and battalions. If it were still 'conventional arms only' then sure, they would almost be viable now. The actual maximum dimensions of military vehicles tends to be limited by the size of the train tunnels, highways and cargo planes that get them into the battle, while industrial vehicles like those enormous dump trucks are assembled in the place where they will work.
** Another Nazi failure was the planned demolition of Berlin to build, among other things, the [
*** In Berlin there remain a few gigantic concrete test cylinders the Nazis cast to see if the soil could support the Volkshalle's weight. Proving real life has a sense of dramatic irony, these cylinders have been steadily (albeit slowly) sinking for sixty years.
** Which is especially weird, because Germans themselves learned that big, heavily armored, but slow vehicles are most vulnerable to air support, after they met KV-2 (which was built to be used against fortifications, after all).
* Millions of years ago, bigger creatures were able to walk the Earth thanks in part to the greater concentration of oxygen in the air. Insects in particular have an inefficient way to carry oxygen to their cells. Back when there was more oxygen, they were able push the envelope on size-there were dragonflies with 3 foot wingspans, for example. Nowadays, the same insects would suffocate.
** Nowadays, as always, the insects grow to whatever size the local atmosphere supports, so all it takes for [[Nightmare Fuel|monster dragonflies and mosquitoes]] to return is a bit more oxygen.
* Elephants often break bones just from tripping and falling over.
* Square Cube law was often cited by proponents of the Tyrannosaurus Rex being a scavenger and not a predator, many people assess that should the T-Rex trip (as often happens to predators in real life), it would sustain crippling or lethal injuries. Others point that the Tyrannosaurus, while fast enough to catch up to larger prey, would not have been nearly as fast as smaller predators (like raptors), which could have lessened the damage in a fall. It may have also employed strategies (like ambushes and a poisonous saliva like a Komodo Dragon's) that may have lessened the need to to run, thus the risk of falls.
** It is now discovered that the Tyrannosaurs were a lot more lightly built than previously thought, increasing their speed and efficiency as a predator. Also, it is believed that their diet changed dramatically through their lifetime. At old age they may well have been scavengers.
*** More like specialist kill-hijackers, same as male lions prefer to be.
** Imagine how slow sauropods would have been due to their gigantic sizes.
*** They couldn't have been too slow, or they would have depleted forests of their leaves faster than they could move to new areas.
** Early paleontologists believed that large dinosaurs lived in swamps, because they approach being too large to move under their own power without the bouyancy of water. But [[Science Marches On]], and discoveries of new fossils or rethinking existing ones led to new schools of thought about dinosaur lifestyles, muscular and skeletal makeup, and even posture. Note that no land-dwelling dinosaurs were ever as large as certain sea creatures, though.
*** Except the near-legendary Amphicoelias fragilimus - [[The Other Wiki]] has more on the various estimates of its length and mass, but it would have been every bit a "terrestrial blue whale".
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