This is a big week for Hollywood: amid a massive writers and actors strike, two potential blockbusters same day opening: Christopher’s Nolan’s Oppenheimer and that of Greta Gerwig Barbie.
The first portrays a man who transformed the world by physics. The latter portrays a woman living in a world that utterly defies the laws of physics.
Oppenheimer’s world is our own, dictated by natural laws that we have studied for centuries. But what might the physical laws of Barbie’s world look like? This is a natural question for me as a Ph.D. student studying philosophy of science. But it’s also a natural question for me as a Barbie expert: When I was a kid, I played with the dolls for much longer than what could be considered “cool.”
For all the philosophers’ research into metaphysically possible worlds, Barbie’s pink and plastic universe is certainly conducive to contemplation. But when I started typing “Barbie physics” into Google to see who was thinking about this problem, the top recommendation was disappointingly “Barbie physique.” There have been countless discussions about Barbie’s fashion sense, but little thought has gone into the workings of her universe. Many have thought about Barbie’s iconic makeup, but not the physical makeup of her universe.
And while I agree that when taken as a benchmark for our own bodies, Barbie’s physique could be harmful to one’s self-image, I think it’s important to remember that Barbie herself never claims to be part of our world. In fact, like immortalized in songwe know she’s “a Barbie girl.” in a Barbie world(emphasis added for emphasis), for which the physical parameters are likely different from ours.
Scientific theorizing often requires us to concern ourselves with possibilities that have never been imagined before. In philosophy and theoretical physics, we often use “thought experiments” to explore the consequences of theories for which empirical verification is impossible. Schrödinger’s cat, Wigner’s friend, and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox are all examples of thought experiments that have been fundamental to modern physics. Especially in cosmology, scientists have to theorize on astronomical scales beyond our experiments. Contemporary cosmologists using models to vary the fundamental constants to experiment with other possible universes.
Imaginative game with Barbies does the same: generations of children experiment with ways the world could be. In their hypothetical musings, they engage in a form of world-building similar to thought experiments or modelling. Playing with Barbies is the opposite of frivolous – as questions about the possibility of a multiverse multiply, that iterative imagination will be essential to our investigation.
Of course, very little data is available to us regarding the physical parameters of the Barbie world. It appears to be causally and temporally detached from our own, much like the universes posited by some models of string theory. However, what little information we have allows us to draw fascinating inferences about the underlying physical picture.
Barbie, if she’s human-sized, would stand at five feet, nine inches and weigh 110 pounds. This is a dangerous underweight in our universe. Yet weight is only the measure of the gravitational force by which the Earth pulls masses toward its center. Perhaps Barbie’s world has a different gravitational constant, for which her weight would be different. Or maybe the gravity differences of the Barbie world caused bodies to develop differently there in the first place. It is a well-documented phenomenon that astronauts often lose weight in space. In a 2018 interview with popular science, Scott Smith, leader of NASA’s Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory, theorized that weightlessness disrupts the “stretching of your stomach — which sends the signal to your brain to say ‘you’re full, stop eating.’ this signal occurs earlier. Perhaps the Barbie world shows similar effects, and her physique reflects that.
When we observe animated representations of the Barbie world, it exhibits strange and bewildering laws of physics. For example indoors Barbie and her sisters on a puppy chase, her world exhibits curious non-Newtonian properties. In one scene, a dog rides a horse and is hurled upward with a jolt. Instead of falling back to the same spot on the horse’s back due to the effects of inertia, the dog flies backwards while the horse continues to move forward. This is consistent with Aristotle’s debunked physical theory, which failed to account for the effects of Newton’s first law of motion. (Interestingly, astrophysicist Luke Barnes of Western Sydney University in Australia explained in a lecture I attended at Rutgers University in July that Nintendo’s Mario and Luigi also seem to live in an Aristotelian universein which they fall backwards even on a platform moving forward.)
The climatic conditions in the Barbie world also remain unknown. Barbie is often seen in her pink convertible with suspiciously perfect hair. Is the Barbie world a world without wind? Wind is caused by air over land absorbing the sun’s heat differently than over water, causing movement. What would this suggest about the air on Barbie’s world – that it absorbs heat evenly no matter where it is or has a constant density? Then there’s the Barbie dream house, a replica of which exists in Malibu, California. The Dreamhouse in Barbie’s world doesn’t seem to be subject to wildfire, which would make sense if there wasn’t any wind. But the house is not adapted to earthquakes, which suggests that the Malibu of the Barbie world has not only different climatic conditions, but also completely different geophysical properties from ours.
Most Barbie dream houses display curious architectural features. First, they are foldable, split in half, with open chambers. This seems to confirm the hypothesis that Barbie lives in a windless world and one without precipitation. How the water cycle functions in the Barbie world is an oddly neglected subject, as is the psychological impact of long-term living in these panoptic-style homes.
Barbie, like us, is a carbon-based life form: plastic is a high molecular weight organic polymer that is 80 percent carbon. However, plastic as the primary substrate of life would certainly have interesting consequences. An area for future research is whether “living in plastic” is indeed “fantastic,” as Aqua’s 1997 song “Barbie Girl,” originally claimed.
It’s clear that there’s still a lot of work to be done to solve the overlooked mysteries of the Barbie universe, and this includes Barbie herself. She is extremely talented – one at the same time astrophysicist, engineer And astronaut-not to mention a general”scientist.” To me, this typifies her broad and interdisciplinary approach to science. While many will come to know J. Robert Oppenheimer’s accomplishments through the movie, let’s not forget Barbie’s – her career has spanned 64 years since her 1959 debut, while Oppenheimer only about 44 active years in the field.
Regardless, both Barbie and Oppenheimer have influenced popular culture to an extraordinary degree and have been subject to scrutiny, admiration, criticism, and praise. Both make us think about the power of imagining new worlds, for better or for worse. I vividly remember the day an older cousin told me that at 10 years old I was too old to play with dolls, and no arguments about the highly advanced world-building I was engaged in made her change her mind. In our debates about Mattel’s Barbie as a feminist hero or an instrument of patriarchy, we have lost sight of the fact that she is not only Mattels Barbie. She is mine and my nephew’s and yours and your child’s. As long as the kids who play with her, Ken and her ever-expanding social circle can imagine new worlds, she’ll be what they make her. And our world will be too.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views of the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.