big = slow

[PWrong]

But if the Earth got hit by a HUGE meteor in the same direction that it was going around the Sun, it would speed up, and would move further away from the Sun wouldn't it?

It would go into an elliptical orbit. The year would be a lot longer. In half of this new year, it would be much further away than it is now (but on the opposite side), and going slow. At the end of the year, it would be back where it started, and going fast again...

[batmanmg]

so does the average velocity of the earth get greater slower or stay the same... becuase as its closer to the sun the velocity is faster,,, but for less distance, and as its further away its slower and for a much greater distance.....

but this is even further off topic...

i agree that larger things take more energy to accelerate...

big ships seem to tavel slower becuase the time it takes for a single point to pass the ships legth is longer than the time for that point to pass a small boats length... your reference points for ships are usualy the surouding waves....

i think its really all up to perspective if you preceive smaller things to move faster.... becuase while to use a flie lives a shorter life span... its perseption of time has to extremely slowed down to be able to make split second manuevers when flying around...

[Hugh]

a flie lives a shorter life span... its perseption of time has to extremely slowed down to be able to make split second manuevers when flying around...

This is something I've always wondered about. Is it possible that creatures such as insects and birds experience the passage of time at a relatively quicker rate than we do? The way that they quickly move and change direction is fascinating to watch.

Anyone here see the original Star Trek episode entitled Wink of an Eye, with the Scalosians, who move at an extremely fast rate in comparison to normal humans? Their voices sounded like the buzzing of an insect to the normal speed humans. If one speeds up a recording of human voices, this is what you hear, buzzes and chirps.

Let's say for example that during the time that we experience one second, they might be able to experience five seconds. What sounds like only chirps and buzzes to us, may actually be lengthy and detailed conversation in their own language. The fact that these creatures have had millions of more years of evolution to develop themselves, may have made this possible.

[bo198214]

Hm, can only say that there is an average relation between body mass and life span. Life span is in average proportional to the 4th root of the mass.

[moonlord]

Then why don't elephants live a lot longer than humans?

[bo198214]

Because humans are quite over average

[batmanmg]

we live longer becuase we are smarter, are dolphins also above this average?

as for the Wink of an Eye episode of startrek.

well its not possible for time to actualy change significantly until you reach near light speeds, what is possible is that the reactions in the brain occur faster, and as a result everthing seems like its moving in slow motion in relation to how we veiw things...

another interesting idea in relation to flies is that they see a totaly diffent spectrum of electromagnetic waves than we do... the interesting thing is wondering what colors they see... or how the brain preceives these waves.

but that is again off topic and would deserve a separate thread

[PWrong]

It's the human body that gets older, not just the brain.

[batmanmg]

yeah but didn't our evolutionary predisecors live shorter lives? but then again... there is the other average killer... sea turtles... they aren't genuises and they live for 100s of years

[moonlord]

...nor are all of them overmassed.

[Pentoon]

We tend to perceive things moving relative to their size and the size of objects that they pass. A 50 foot truck going 68 miles per hour is going 100 feet per second. It travels two times its own length every second. A 15 foot long sports car going 100 feet per second travels 6 2/3 times its own length every second. If you watch the truck alone and then the car alone, it looks like the car is going more than three times faster than the truck even though they're both going at the same speed.

[rdococ]

The reason big tends to be slow is because bigger objects tend to be heavier, and heavier objects take more force to accelerate.

[wendy]

It's actually the other way; big things are fast. The governing rule is v²=gl where g is gravity, and l is a length metric. But people are prolly comparing v/l, which would give a big=slow measure..

[PatrickPowers]

I have noticed this too watching football players run on television. The big people may appear to be slower than the little people even though they were actually faster. I think it is because big people take fewer strides than smaller people. Also the television screen removes size clues. If the observer were actually present judgement would be more accurate.

Little animals like mice and squirrels appear to be moving fast, but they cover much less ground per unit time than can an elephant. Somehow our minds judge speed as proportional to size. Their quickness due to low inertia also gives the impression of speed.

Hollywood special effects crews build miniature models. These are filmed in high speed then played back slow to give the illusion of size. This is easy: it takes a large thing longer to fall down because it's top is further from the ground. A fireball moves at roughly the same speed regardless of size, so a large fireball moves proportionally slower. etc.

But orbiting of the sun has nothing to do with size. All that matters is the distance from the sun, the mass of the planet has nothing to do with it.

[PatrickPowers]

Anyone here see the original Star Trek episode entitled Wink of an Eye, with the Scalosians, who move at an extremely fast rate in comparison to normal humans? Their voices sounded like the buzzing of an insect to the normal speed humans. If one speeds up a recording of human voices, this is what you hear, buzzes and chirps.

I believe that that was stolen from The Wild Wild West, which had an episode with the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjj9KKcRbJU
4/8/1966

Five months before the premier of Star Trek, which my eleven-year-old self adored.

[Hugh]

Anyone here see the original Star Trek episode entitled Wink of an Eye, with the Scalosians, who move at an extremely fast rate in comparison to normal humans? Their voices sounded like the buzzing of an insect to the normal speed humans. If one speeds up a recording of human voices, this is what you hear, buzzes and chirps.

I believe that that was stolen from The Wild Wild West, which had an episode with the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjj9KKcRbJU
4/8/1966

Five months before the premier of Star Trek, which my eleven-year-old self adored.

Hi Patrick. I watched bits and pieces of that WWWest show and it was good, thanks!

After googling around a bit, it looks like Gene L. Coon (under the pen name Lee Cronin) wrote the original story in which the WWWest show was based on. Then when Gene was producing for Star Trek, he allowed his original story to be used again for the Wink of an Eye episode. So it looks like it wasn't really "stolen", just re-used by the original creator.

With regards to this thread, an interesting study was published a while back about how time is perceived to pass based on "Critical flicker fusion frequency," a fascinating idea.

Here is the link to the article: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/16/time-passes-slowly-flies-study

I've copied the article here:
_________________________

Time passes more slowly for flies, study finds

Research suggests perception of time is linked to size, explaining why insects find it easy to avoid being swatted

Flies avoid being swatted in just the same way Keanu Reeves dodges flying bullets in the movie The Matrix – by watching time pass slowly.

To the insect, that rolled-up newspaper moving at lightning speed might as well be inching through thick treacle.

Like Reeves standing back and side-stepping slo-mo bullets, the fly has ample time to escape. And it is not alone in its ability to perceive time differently from us. Research suggests that across a wide range of species, time perception is directly related to size.

Generally the smaller an animal is, and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower time passes.

The evidence comes from research into the ability of animals to detect separate flashes of fast-flickering light.

"Critical flicker fusion frequency" – the point at which the flashes seem to merge together, so that a light source appears constant – provides an indication of time perception. Comparing studies of the phenomenon in different animals revealed the link with size.

"A lot of researchers have looked at this in different animals by measuring their perception of flickering light," said Dr Andrew Jackson, from Trinity College Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. "Some can perceive quite a fast flicker and others much slower, so that a flickering light looks like a blur.

"Interestingly, there's a large difference between big and small species. Animals smaller than us see the world in slo-mo. It seems to be almost a fact of life. Our focus was on vertebrates, but if you look at flies, they can perceive light flickering up to four times faster than we can. You can imagine a fly literally seeing everything in slow motion."

The effect may also account for the way time seems to speed up as we get older, said Jackson, who led the research. He was inspired to conduct the study after noticing the way small children always seem to be in such a hurry.

"It's tempting to think that for children time moves more slowly than it does for grownups, and there is some evidence that it might," he said.

"People have shown in humans that flicker fusion frequency is related to a person's subjective perception of time, and it changes with age. It's certainly faster in children."

TV, computer and cinema screens all flicker but provide the illusion of constant images because of the high frequencies at which they operate.

But dog owners may be surprised to learn that their pets can see TV flickers, said Jackson. Their visual system has a refresh rate higher than that of the TV screen.

The animals studied covered more than 30 species, including rodents, eels, lizards, chickens, pigeons, dogs, cats and leatherback turtles.

The latter are big creatures with a slow metabolic rate, for whom time passes relatively rapidly.

Smaller, more agile creatures had the most refined ability to perceive information in a unit of time, said the researchers writing in the journal Animal Behaviour. In other words, they were able to see more flickers of light per second.

Time perception is just another aspect of evolution and survival, the scientists believe.

"Our results lend support to the importance of time perception in animals where the ability to perceive time on very small scales may be the difference between life and death for fast-moving organisms," said co-author Kevin Healy, a PhD student at the school of natural sciences at Trinity College, Dublin.

Prof Graeme Ruxton, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, who also took part in the research, said: "Having eyes that send updates to the brain at much higher frequencies than our eyes do is of no value if the brain cannot process that information equally quickly. Hence, this work highlights the impressive capabilities of even the smallest animal brains.

"Flies might not be deep thinkers, but they can make good decisions very quickly."

Some animals may exploit differences in time perception to their advantage, according to Dr Luke McNally, another member of the team from the University of Edinburgh.

"For example, many species use flashing lights as signals, such as fireflies and many deep-sea animals," he said. "Larger and slower predator species may not be able to decode these signals if their visual system isn't fast enough, giving the signallers a secret channel of communication."

[wendy]

Actually, it's gravity that has a lot to do with it. Things are easier to move if they follow a pendulum, and this is where the mass of the planet comes to play. It provides the g in gl=v² metric. The number of days in the year has little to do with it, though.

There is quite a lot written about proportion. The number of heartbeats in a standard life is pretty constant, (13 million = 13*120^4), as is the breaths. This matches up with v, that v/t = g is constant for all animals.

The 4/3 metabolism rule says that for an animal, power^4 = weight ^3, which means that larger animals need less food per pound than smaller ones do. A person weighing sixteen stones, will need eight times the food a dog weighing one pound does.

The time it takes to pee, is the sixth root of weight, but you expect that in this system. Mass is the sixth power of time.

[PatrickPowers]

Small animals can definitely react more quickly. The nervous system is quite slow, and in a small animal the distance for a message to travel to the brain is much shorter.

[damian.hallbauer]

I think what you are thinking about is the way things scale . its best explained here https://www.av8n.com/physics/scaling.htm. Near the end. So, mass scales to the r 3, while the bone strength is directly related to its cross section which scales to r2. That's why an insect jumps so high, and fast , relatively, while the Elephant has disproportionately giant bones, and lumbers around.

Also consider the atom , which doesn't scale with the structure. this could be is a 3 ,4 ,5 order effect so right there is something nonlinear scaling. if you are made of 3000 atoms ?.. like a flagellum motor .. and you are closer to that Brownian excitement, and rapidly being uncertain about where you are..

and, the , evolution, or fighting amongst the species... small mammals need to keep up the pace.. with the little legs or they get snapped up.. cat vs mouse...