Isn't she frightening? Well, not that frightening, according to Mr. LaBarbera:

Here's the trick to defeating the giant ants. You don't want a rifle, you want a pile of bricks and a good pitching arm. One well-hurled brick hitting a leg and--plink!--the leg goes into local buckling and collapses, increasing the load on the remaining legs. Two more bricks and you've taken out all the legs on one side; all the bug can do is scrabble in circles. Three more bricks and the giant insect is completely immobilized.
The secret behind this trick is internal buckling of a 2 meters tubular structure; it sounds technical, yet LaBarbera makes it understandable with a bunch of familiar experiments involving toothpicks. It is amazing that physical properties that are so obvious on normal scale should elude us altogether when we come to apply them, not at quantum-mechanics or cosmological levels, but simply in a universe ten times bigger than ours.

"Hopelessly naive" is what LaBarbera calls Hollywood's approach to giant monsters. That is precisely what interests me: why do our naive theories of biology and physics (see the AlphaPsy Primer on science and folk science) ignore the most basics scaling effects, like the fact that a mouse does not get hurt when falling from a height of one meter, that King Kong, had he existed, would have crumbled under its own weight the day of its birth, not to mention the astounding effects of shrinking and gigantism on metabolism and heat regulation. An example that sheds light on a well-known habit of ancient poliorcetics:

As J.B.S. Haldane put it in his classic essay, "On Being the Right Size," "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving on the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away....A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes." Haldane was being quite literal.

These facts were known to our ancestors, who used this aspect of scaling to gruesome effect--a common strategy during medieval sieges was to take a carcass of a horse, let it ripen for a few days in the sun, and then catapult it over the walls of the besieged town. On impact, the carcass would indeed splash, spreading contagion throughout the city.

The passage depicting the heroes of Fantastic Adventure struggling with Brownian motion is hilarious. So is this one:

Other movies have played with the theme of tiny people in an otherwise normal world, including The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989). But none of these movies ever deals with the problem of what happens to the object's mass when it shrinks. I can imagine two ways to shrink an object. One would be to start removing molecules, perhaps halving the number in each cycle of shrinkage. But molecules are integer quantities; sooner or later, this strategy is going to lead to half a molecule, which won't work. (Particularly for biological objects. Remember, each cell in your body only has two copies of your genetic information, one in each strand of the DNA in your chromosomes.)

Another way to shrink an object would be to decrease the distance between an atom's nucleus and its electron cloud-atoms are, after all, mostly empty space. I'm not enough of a physicist to have any intuition about what this would do to basic physics and chemistry, but one result of this strategy would be to leave the object's mass unchanged. If volume decreases but mass does not, then density must increase. The shrinkage is sufficiently limited in these movies that we don't have to worry about dealing with miniature black holes, but an object the size of a cell but the mass of a submarine--as in Fantastic Voyage--is going to pass through the table, the floor, and the earth's mantle like a hot knife through butter.

These examples (and there are lots more in LaBarbera's huge essay) are a marvellous case study in folk science, and the way our deeply held physical intuitions can mislead us very simply and effectively. The take-home message for a psychologist is clearly:

(1) naive biology ignores scaling effects: a 20 meters-high cat is a cat, full stop.

(2) naive physics applies the same way on small and great scales (as the alchemists of old had it: what's high and what's low are alike, and both behave in the same way).

If you think that your naive theory of biomechanics is of no use for social cognition and has no anthropological relevance, then you're ignoring a mass of data concerning emotion recognition from gait and posture, and also some more subtle social cues distilled through morphology:

Consider King Kong Lives (1986), a sequel to the 1976 version of King Kong. The premise of the movie is that Kong survives his fall from the World Trade Center (patently impossible, as we saw in Session 3) and is fitted with an artificial heart the size of a Volkswagen, restoring him to his full imposing health. Kong eventually meets a female version of himself captured in the Indo-Pacific, they fall in love, one thing leads to another, and soon Mrs. Kong is expecting.

The scene where Kong Jr. is born was fascinating, but not for anything that happened on the screen. Clearly the directors expected Kong Jr. to be an object of sympathy to the audience, but when Junior appeared I clearly remember that the audience around me looked puzzled, not charmed. The explanation is simple. On screen, the relative sizes of Daddy, Mommy, and Baby Kong were more or less correct, but Junior was a man in a gorilla suit and the audience's hindbrain knew by the body proportions that this was no newborn, regardless of what the story line or the relative sizes said. We are not fooled that easily.

When I was a kid, my (French) teachers had me learn a nursery rhyme by Robert Desnos; it goes like this:

"Une fourmi de dix-huit mètres,

avec un chapeau sur la tête,

ça n'existe pas,

ça n'existe pas.

Et pourquoi pas?"

It states that there is no such thing as an 18-meters ant, and wonders why this is so; I realise I spent all those years ignoring the answer. It was high time Mr. LaBarbera came up with it.