If you can shrink and expand stuff instantly, the thing getting bigger or smaller is the least useful part of that spell. You wouldn’t even need gunpowder to launch stuff, put a shrunk cannonball against a wall, expand it, hope the wall holds and it’s the cannonball that has to accelerate to light speed to not be in the same place as the wall. Or get a giant explosion, that’s more likely.
That does raise some interesting questions. To break as few laws of physics as possible, we can assume there’s no truly “instant” transformation. The question then becomes how quickly the transformation happens, and whether the transformation is linear with respect to radius, volume, or mass.
I feel like Randall Munroe would have a good answer.
If you can shrink and expand stuff instantly, the thing getting bigger or smaller is the least useful part of that spell. You wouldn’t even need gunpowder to launch stuff, put a shrunk cannonball against a wall, expand it, hope the wall holds and it’s the cannonball that has to accelerate to light speed to not be in the same place as the wall. Or get a giant explosion, that’s more likely.
That does raise some interesting questions. To break as few laws of physics as possible, we can assume there’s no truly “instant” transformation. The question then becomes how quickly the transformation happens, and whether the transformation is linear with respect to radius, volume, or mass.
I feel like Randall Munroe would have a good answer.