ELI5, Why do larger things appear to fall much slower, does it appear slower or is it actually slow?

Question

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?

Thanks

In: 0

Answer 1

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.