If I drive my car through a corner slowly I’ll be fine. If I go fast, the car will skid off the road. All the materials are the same, the execution is the same. The only difference is over what amount of time this happens? The example is not important, the same goes for pretty much anything. Filling a bottle, ripping a sheet of paper..
I understand this from a intuitive perspective, but I wonder if someone can explain why time matters in physics in a simple way. What is the fundamental difference between doing something fast vs. slow.
I’m sure this is a silly question if you know some thermal dynamics or special relativity, but remember, I’m only 5!
In: Physics
There are a number of different ways you could approach this, but I would suggest that the most important is the relationship between energy and time. Energy is one of the most important concepts in physics and doing something fast or slow necessarily changes how much energy is involved. A car hitting a wall at 1 m/s vs 30 m/s produces very different results because the latter has 900x more energy involved and that energy needs to go somewhere. How this difference in energy manifests itself will depend on the context, but the fundamental difference between doing something fast or slow is how much energy is involved; and since fast and slow don’t make sense without the concept of time, energy and time are inherently related.
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