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

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

In: Physics

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s the same reason that big things like trucks or airplanes look like they’re going much slower than a car even if they’re actually going faster…we estimate speed by comparing how things are moving against their background and we’re wired up to accurately track speed on human-sized objects so our sense of speed scales with the object size.

Things that are really big or small screw with our sense of scale…rather than realize that the object is really big and just moving really fast, our brain assumes it’s “normal sized” and moving slower. Really small objects go the other way…they look like they’re going faster than they really are.

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