I was watching some ‘end of the world’ movies, and quite a few of them seem to a have a shot of a massive skyscraper collapsing. But this look very slow almost as if in slow motion. Even in movies that show perspective of insects, human actions are much slower ( the pest killer scene in the ant bully)
So is this just a weird thing movies implement to make it look cool or is this an actual phenomenon and why does it occur?
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Is it just me, or do airplanes look super slow irl too? Even when they’re near the ground and not far away.
the distance away. The farther away an object is, the longer the distance for the same angle of change. Picture a jet in the sky flying over. It seems to move slow even though it’s moving very fast. Standing close to the same jet it goes by in an instant.
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Skyscrapers fall at the same acceleration rate as planned implosion smokestacks and nuclear cooling towers. These things are just big, a perspective hard to comprehend like a plane slowly floating across the sky, because it is 50 meters long and 10 km up.
It takes a long time for an object to fall 500 feet, and a large structure collapse has to hit and damage more of the building as it collapses, slowing it further.
The representation of a bug and “giant” people is for your benefit to recognize how big the objects are in comparison. A movie about bees from their perspective in actual time would be like they were going 1000km/hr.
For very large things, it’s just a matter of perspective. It looks like it’s falling slowly because the distance it falls is smaller relative to its size.
An object 100m tall falls 10m, it’s only moved 10% of its height. An object 1 metre tall falls 10m, it’s moved 1000% of its height. The small thing looks faster without actually moving faster.
There’s also air resistance. It’s only true that all objects fall with the same acceleration in a vacuum. In an atmosphere, larger objects have a greater air resistance, so they do fall slower.
>Even in movies that show perspective of insects, human actions are much slower ( the pest killer scene in the ant bully)
That’s a different thing.
It’s to do with the square cube law. An objects mass comes from its volume, which is proportional to its size cubed. But its muscle strength comes from the cross-sectional area of the muscles, not their volume, so it’s proportional to its size squared.
That means if an object doubles in size, it has 8 times the mass, but only 4 times the muscle strength. This is why large animals like elephants move slowly, and why tiny animals like ants can move really fast and jump really high relative to their own size.
What the movies are doing is using the fact that we associate things moving very slowly with size to get across the idea that the humans are very big to the ants. It’s not that ants see us moving really slowly, it’s just faking it to give the impression of size. There’s a reason you see this in cartoons but not in anything attempting to be realistic.
Two factors here.
First, we humans do not see size. We see angle. A soda can at arm’s length appears larger than the moon, because the moon occupies a much smaller angle of our vision (because it is so far away).
While we can sort of guess how fast something is going based on distance, we aren’t always super good at it, and our first instinct is often wrong. For example, jet planes are quite fast, but even with how fast they are they are also very far away, so their movement only changes the angle to them a little bit at a time and they seem slow.
There is another thing involved here, though, and that is how gravity works. Ignoring for the moment the existence of air, gravity moves all things down at the same rate. A brick and a feather dropped (in a vacuum) will hit the floor at the same time.
This also means that a softball and *the titanic* dropped from the same distance above the ground will hit the ground at the same time. However, if you were to watch the titanic fall, you’d be watching it from very far away, so for the reason we discussed earlier it appears to move much slower. If you watch a softball fall, you’re probably right next to it.
The acceleration any object experiences due to gravity on Earth is basically constant. 9.81 meters per second per second. The 9.81 meters per second that something goes after falling for one second feels a lot faster on a small objects than in large ones though. For human that means moving about 5 times an average human height in a second, but for a building that means multiple seconds to fall its own height. So it looks like it’s moving slower relative to its size, but in fact everything falls at the same speed.
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