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
Gravity acts with equal force on all objects. Yes, those objects with more mass have more to be pulled but they also pull back with greater power. So in short, all objects have constant acceleration. There are some ways in which objects can fall slower if their shape means they have maximised air resistance compared to their weight (think a piece of paper or a feather) but in practice most items will fall at approximately the same speed because of this.
The difference comes when you consider the scale of items. You might think that an item which is one meter tall should collapse in the same time that something 100 metres tall collapses, but this would be to forget that both items fall at the same speed *but one has much further to go* – one hundred times further, no less. It won’t take 100 times longer because it will accelerate and accelerate in a way that the 1m object didn’t have time for, but it still has to take a long time to cover that distance. The thing is, you end up standing a long way away from the object so you can watch it fall safely, and that means that you forget just how far it has to travel, making it seem very slow. It’s just a case of perspective and scale, though.
Latest Answers