Is that realistic? Do ants see us like that?
In: Physics
It’s not about perception of speed or anything like that. The main reason is the square-cube law.
The strength of your muscles is proportional to their cross sectional area, which is proportional to the square of their size. If you double the size of an animal, its muscles get four times stronger.
But your weight is proportional to your volume, which is proportional to size *cubed*. If you double the size of an animal, its weight goes up by a factor of eight.
So, muscle strength goes up by a factor of 4, weight goes up by a factor of 8. This means that bigger animals have to carry more weight with proportionally weaker muscles. Which means they can’t move as quickly. Ants can physically move their legs faster than elephants can.
Same goes for wings, by the way. Double the size of a bird and it has to carry 8 times the mass with only 4 times the lifting power. That’s why bigger birds have bigger wings relative to their body.
The other factor is about movement relative to the body. A giant stepping over a city in a single stride is actualyl moving incredibly fast. But because it does that in one stride, it doesn’t look like it’s moving very fast relative to the rest of its body. It takes a long time to make one step.
So it’ll look like it’s moving slowly relative to something that covers the same distance in 1000 tiny steps, even though they’re really moving at the same speed.
Some movies portray this accurately, other movies get the general idea of “big things move slowly” and then inaccurately conclude that this means that if you shrink a person, they’d see normal sized people as moving in slow motion. They would not. The small person would move faster but their perception wouldn’t change.
Latest Answers