eli5 why at stop lights turn signal flashes sync up for only a little bit
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This is a tough one to explain simply but ill give it a try:
The short answer is, they don’t sync up. At least not the way you think they do. What you feel to be synced up is in fact just them being close enough together for you not to notice.
An example could be done with 2 lights flashing at very close but slightly different times, this makes the time difference between blinks longer. By making the blinks really slow, it would be easier to spot this fake syncronizing:
Light 1 takes 59 seconds to flash
Light 2 takes 61 seconds to flash
If they start at the exact same time, after 59 seconds the first will flash and 2 seconds later the second one will flash, at this point they are already unsynced. Then once 1 minute 58 seconds have passed, the first light will flash again, with the second one following 4 seconds behind.
This repeats until 3,599 minutes have passed, at which point there will be 1 more perfectly syncronized flash.
So the main reason that car blinkers seem to sync and desync is because they have similar, but not identical pauses between blinks, us humans are just incapable of seeing the difference between 0.995 seconds and 1.005 seconds.
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