I was on YouTube and went down the YouTube rabbit hole. Ended up watching a [compilation](https://youtu.be/WDY7uD4E8p4) of water towers collapsing. That’s what sparked this question. It’s portrayed well in movies when a giant monster is destroying a city. It seems as if Godzilla is moving in slow motion. Anyone know why this phenomenon occurs?
In: Physics
Your eyes and brain are sort of stupid. One way we tend to gauge speed is by how quickly an object moves across our visual field, which is to say the angle it covers from our point of view.
The problem is that the distance an arc sweeps out depends on how far away on the line you consider the arc to be. A very distant point means a much greater distance the arc covers; this means distant objects will cover a lesser apparent arc than a closer object moving at the same speed.
Very big objects viewed from a great distance away might be moving quite quickly, yet still only cover a small angle of our vision. Our dumb visual processing doesn’t know how to accurately gauge long distances, or do the geometry to figure out the real speed of such distant objects like we can usually manage in closer interactions.
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