Why is it that when large structures fall, they appear to do so in “slow motion”?

Question

Like if I knock over a toy car, it seems to happen quickly, but a large building collapsing seems to happen “slower”?

In: Physics

Answer 1

When you knock over a toy building it only has to fall a couple of feet. When you knock over a real building it has to fall hundreds of feet. Suffice to say that it takes longer for the building to fall those hundreds of feet, so if you compare it to the smaller version then I suppose you could compare it to slow motion, but it’s simply that the scales are larger and so things take longer to complete that distance.