Some Further Speculations On The Nature Of The Quantum Realm After ANT-MAN AND THE WASP Trailer 2

Boy, oh boy, what a month April was. Or rather what a fantastic last couple of weeks it’s been. Avengers: Infinity War hit theaters hard and is still toppling global box office records with few signs it’ll stop any time soon. The same can be said of the MCU itself, as Ant-Man And The Wasp is set for release this July, and we recently got a second trailer for the movie that provided a greater look at the Quantum Realm as well as offering up some new tidbits of the plot. I’ve noticed something about the trailer that I don’t think anyone else has though. There’s a single shot in there that appears to show the classic Ant-Man and the Wasp in a warehouse fighting some goons. To see for yourself, skip to the 1:33 mark in the trailer.

Ant-Man and the Wasp as seen in 2015’s Ant-Man

Janet Van Dyne as The Wasp seen in Ant-Man And The Wasp Trailer 2

Hank Pym as Ant-Man as seen in Ant-Man And The Wasp Trailer 2

Either Scott and Hope are forced to don the classic outfits for some reason or we’ll be treated to a flashback sequence showing Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer as the original dynamic duo. Setting the plot aside though, because we’re focusing on the Quantum Realm here, and more importantly, how it works in the grander scheme of the MCU’s physics. This idea I’m about to present came out of watching some documentary about the universe on NatGeo Science or one of those channels, so this is some next level legit stuff. Or not. I’m no Quantum Physicist.

The idea is this: the Quantum Realm is to alternate universes what the fabric of space/time is to planets, or dark matter is to galaxies. Unlike space/time or dark matter, the Quantum Realm isn’t as straightforward as just being the cosmological soup that planets and galaxies sit in. It seems to me that the Quantum Realm is just as macroversal as it is microversal. Take Ghost’s abilities for example; she derives her powers from the Quantum Realm (which I’ve discussed before) according to Luis, and has the ability to phase through solid objects. It would seem to me that her abilities involve destabilizing the atoms of her body, much in the same way that Pym Particles shrink the space between atoms. It never hit me before, but fiddling with atoms means fiddling with electrons, which are commonly focused on in Quantum experiments. As I understand it, electrons exist within a probability field, rather than fixed points in space/time. This is a staple of Quantum Mechanics, as it lends credence to the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment. In other words, in an environment where there are two possibilities, you’re not gonna know which possibility has become reality until you observe the environment. In that experiment, the cat is an allegory for the electron, but you can scale it up to the universal level. The possibility that does not become reality actually plays out in a parallel universe. I believe the Quantum Realm is where all these universes are stored, and we know for a fact, thanks to Doctor Strange in Avengers: Infinity War, that this principle of possibilities playing out according to actions in alternate realities is true in the MCU. He viewed 14,000,605 different futures in the buildup to the confrontation with Thanos. That’s all based in Quantum Mechanics, made possible by the existence of the Quantum Realm. In essence, just as if you grew to an unfathomable height, you’d see stars as no larger than atoms, you can shrink enough to see Quantum Events that spawn alternate realities within the Quantum Realm.

To cap off, the Quantum Realm is a universe-wide probability field that contains the roots of all alternate realities spawned by Quantum Events. I’ll go into this in a bit more detail in my next post, which will deal with the possibilities of Captain Marvel’s ties to the Quantum Realm and how that will factor into Avengers 4.