Pym Particles

Of all the strange and wonderful sciences in the Marvel universe — the gamma rays of Bruce Banner, the magic of Doctor Strange, the cosmic crystals of Thanos — perhaps none is stranger or more wonderful than the Pym Particle. And if you want to know about Pym Particles, the very best person to ask is not the man who discovered them. It is his daughter.

Hope van Dyne can recite the equation of the Pym Particle the way most people can recite the alphabet. She learned it when she was very small. Her father, Dr. Hank Pym, would stand in the laboratory at Pym Technologies in San Francisco, balancing his daughter on his hip, pointing at the chalkboard, and explaining the math as though Hope were already a fellow scientist. Sometimes she was, even then.

Here is what makes a Pym Particle so very strange.

If you take a tennis ball and shrink it down — actually physically shrink it — most science would tell you the ball would weigh less, hit softer, bounce smaller. But the Pym Particle does something different. It changes only the distance between the atoms inside the tennis ball, not the atoms themselves. The ball gets smaller, but every atom inside it stays exactly as heavy and exactly as strong as it was before.

What this means in everyday terms is wild.

When Hope shrinks down to the size of a bee, her body is still as heavy as a full-grown human. Her punch lands with all the force of an adult woman, concentrated into a fist the size of a grain of rice. A guard at a Pym Tech facility could be standing in a perfectly secure hallway, and Hope — flying past as a tiny dot — could knock him out cold with one strike to the temple, and he would never see what hit him.

There is also a color code to the science. In her father's notes, in his own careful handwriting, the rules are simple. Red particles shrink. Blue particles grow. There are particles for going small, particles for going to ant-size, particles for going to dust-size, particles for going to atom-size, and a separate batch for growing up into Giant-Man and beyond. The Wasp suit has a tiny dial built into the wrist. With one click Hope is small. With another click she is normal. With another click she is big.

But the Pym Particle is also dangerous. And Hope, more than anyone alive, knows it.

There is a line — scientists call it the subatomic barrier — beyond which a shrinking person passes from the ordinary world into the Quantum Realm. The Quantum Realm is a place where time does not move the way it does up here, where space curls in strange directions, where ordinary physics tells you only half the truth. People who fall into the Quantum Realm by accident do not always come back. Hope's own mother, Janet, the original Wasp, was lost there for thirty years.

So when Hope works with Pym Particles, she does not joke. She does not show off. She calibrates carefully. She measures twice. She uses the safety locks. She respects the science the way a sailor respects the sea.

Scott Lang, who shares some of her workload as the new Ant-Man, is not quite so calm about it. Scott once accidentally shrank himself in his bathtub. He once accidentally shrank his keys in his pocket and could not find them for a week. He once ENlarged a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser by mistake during a fight and rolled it through downtown San Francisco like a runaway boulder. Hope loves Scott — sort of — but she is forever fixing the science he breaks.

In the laboratory, Hope is the master craftsman. She designed her own Wasp gauntlets, the ones with the bio-electric stingers built right into the wrists. She redesigned Scott's Ant-Man helmet so it would not glitch in cold weather. She built a portable laboratory the size of a small rolling suitcase that, with one tap of a blue Pym disc, grows up into a fully equipped two-story research facility right on a San Francisco street corner. Then, when she is done, she shrinks it back into the suitcase and walks it home like luggage.

And she remembers the warnings.

Years ago, a man named Darren Cross — once Hank's brightest student — turned greedy. He built a stolen suit called the Yellowjacket and tried to sell Pym Particle technology to dangerous people around the world. He almost won. The Pym family stopped him together, with Scott's help, but the lesson stuck. One vial of red particles in the wrong hands could shrink a tank, a missile, a city block, even a skyscraper. Imagine someone shrinking the Golden Gate Bridge and putting it in their coat pocket. That is the kind of power Hope guards.

So she does not let just anyone near the formula.

There is a story Scott tells, sometimes, when people ask about Hope. He says he once watched her stay up for sixty hours straight refining a Pym disc that wasn't quite holding its charge. He brought her coffee. He brought her snacks. He tried to make her sleep. She would not stop until the disc was perfect.

"How do you do it?" Scott asked.

Hope looked up from her workbench, her eyes a little tired but very clear.

"Pym Particles are not a toy," she said. "They are not a magic trick. They are physics. And physics keeps its promises. So I have to keep mine."

Then she clicked the dial on her wrist.

She shrank to the size of a thimble.

And she got back to work.