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
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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.
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