I know the rules say “don’t literally explain it as if it’s a 5-year-old” but in this case I truly think the “dumbest” you can make the answer, the better
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Clear explanation doesn’t necessarily mean dumb. If anything, the smartest answers are clear, the dumbest are so convoluted that you can’t follow them.
Takes a lot of energy to move a lot of mass. Takes even more of it [energy] to move it really fast. When you’re thinking of large objects like ships, heavy construction equipment, large trucks, etc…: they’re limited by the “power plants” that they can fit inside.
That being said. Big things can still move fast. Just takes a lot of effort/expenditure to make them fast
I think it has something to do with bigger mass being more resistant to movement and thus needs more power to move in the first place, much less move faster.
I’d say it is because more effort is required to move bigger things
Try pulling a little cart, no problem right? But if you’d try to pull an entire truck with the same strength it wouldn’t move at all. Now try a medium sized cart and fill it up with a whole buncha thing.. you could still move it but you’d be much slower then when you were pulling the small empty cart.
Could I have an example. For instance blue whales can swim up to 20 miles an hour , and elephants about the same on land. Usain bolt topped off at like 27 but he’s also like the fastest guy on the planet and a bit of an outlier.
First question: are big animals all that slower?
Blue whales can reach 20 mph in a sprint, and African Elephants can reach 15-25 mph. That’s not all that slower than a dog.
But the simple answer is that it takes more energy to move that mass around.
“Move more slowly” is decently misleading.
It’s more thag bigger objects tend to be more massive (or, in simple terms: heavier). Heavier objects are harder to accelerate, because it require more energy (or, in simple terms: a bigger push, be it stronger or longer).
A small car and a big delivery truck can both move at 100 miles per hour, if they get a big enough push.
The best way to do that experiment, is to grab a glass marble (available at your nearest craft store), a quarter of a sheet of paper, and a straw. Roll the paper into a ball, and try to use the straw to blow air on it to accelerate it: it should accelerate rather easily. Now set the marble down, and try to do the same with the straw on it. It should accelerate slower, but ideally, with a big enough surface, it should accelerate to the same speed (assuming you blew on both at the same strength, and for long enough that is).
Now, you can make the argument that bigger things have a lower terminal velocity (maximum speed) while crashing down on Earth, and lighter things have a higher one, but that would be due to other factors like air resistance, in which size has an effect.
To be as brief as possible it just looks slow usually due to scale.
Think of your classic lumbering jack and the bean stalk like giant. I bet you can immagine him taking a big, lumbering, slow step. Which for us if we moved our legs that fast relative to our body size and position at any moment we would take ages just to walk to the end of the driveway. The giant, though he looks like he is taking a step in slowmo likely covered hundreds of feet in that one step. Sure that step took 3 times as long but it went 300 times as far as yours so really he went 100 times further then you could in that time taking three whole faster steps.
Same thing for a little toy tower that you knock down and it falls in a foot long arc vs. A giant tree being felled.
Conversely look how fast most walking bugs look, their little legs move so fast relative to their size it’s a blur. But even though you can’t cycle your legs that fast you more assuredly can outrun an ant and most bugs that run.
One thing to consider is that larger objects take up more total space in your field of view. When you cast your gaze into any finite space, your brain processes what you’re seeing in an arrangement of objects, and uses monocular (perceptible with just one eye) and binocular (effects when observed with two eyes) cues to process depth perception and motion. If you perceive two objects in the distance which you believe are an equal distance away but different sizes, it could appear that the smaller of the objects is traveling faster because it moves position more dramatically within your field of view, due in part to its relation to background objects.
Mass equals inertia. Bigger things don´t move slower, they just need more energy to stop being in rest or in uniform rectilinear motion.
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