- #1
diZcomm1
- 9
- 0
I am not a physicist, but one who is fascinated by the discipline. It has a occurred to me that the size of a moving object affects the perception of motion, and perhaps motion itself. I have a thought experiment to illustrate:
A race is about to take place. In fact, it is the well known tortoise and hare competition, but with two very big differences. The Tortoise is incredibly huge. In fact, it is the size of small mountain, with legs and feet the size of a twenty story building. Each is a full city block at its base. The hare, on the other hand, is equally disproportionate but in the opposite direction. He is the size of a miscroscopic mite. He is so small that he would be just barely visible if he were sitting on your thumb nail right now.
The race takes place on a straight dirt track exactly one hundred yards long. A starter on the sidelines yells, “Ready…set…” and he fires his pistol.
Let’s start with the tortoise. He is well aware of his size advantage. Looking down, he sees that the hundred yard space between the Start and Finish line is far below him and it is virtually a rectangular speck -- a thin, short area which he knows he can cover with the slightest forward movement of one huge foot. Positive of his win, when the gun goes off, he simply lifts and moves a single foot in a very leisurely manner from the Start line across the Finish line. This action takes one half second.
The microscopic hare, on the other hand, has looked at that same hundred yard stretch and he sees what appears to be an infinite distance in front of him. In fact just the Start line is an incredibly wide band of white powder strewn with huge boulders (grains of sand) and tremendous white dunes (the starting line powder). But this microscopic little hare is no pushover. The instant the starting gun is fired, he takes off like a shot.
Who wins? To everyone’s surprise, the race is a photo finish – an exact tie! And here's where a seeming paradox comes in. According to the clock on the sidelines, the tortoise and the hare moved at exactly the same speed. They both started exactly on the gun shot and crossed the finish line at exactly the same instant. But let's imagine traveling that “same speed" in each of their “worlds.”
In the tortoise’s immense world, the motion was a slow, easy movement of one foot. He simply lifted it up and slowly moved it forward. In the microscopic world of the mite sized hare, however, in order to get to the finish line at the same time, his motion was lightning fast. To travel that 100 yards in just one half second, he had to blast down the track, virtually like a bullet.
So the question is: Are these differences in motion only perceptions? Or, is the motion of an object somehow relative to it’s size?
A race is about to take place. In fact, it is the well known tortoise and hare competition, but with two very big differences. The Tortoise is incredibly huge. In fact, it is the size of small mountain, with legs and feet the size of a twenty story building. Each is a full city block at its base. The hare, on the other hand, is equally disproportionate but in the opposite direction. He is the size of a miscroscopic mite. He is so small that he would be just barely visible if he were sitting on your thumb nail right now.
The race takes place on a straight dirt track exactly one hundred yards long. A starter on the sidelines yells, “Ready…set…” and he fires his pistol.
Let’s start with the tortoise. He is well aware of his size advantage. Looking down, he sees that the hundred yard space between the Start and Finish line is far below him and it is virtually a rectangular speck -- a thin, short area which he knows he can cover with the slightest forward movement of one huge foot. Positive of his win, when the gun goes off, he simply lifts and moves a single foot in a very leisurely manner from the Start line across the Finish line. This action takes one half second.
The microscopic hare, on the other hand, has looked at that same hundred yard stretch and he sees what appears to be an infinite distance in front of him. In fact just the Start line is an incredibly wide band of white powder strewn with huge boulders (grains of sand) and tremendous white dunes (the starting line powder). But this microscopic little hare is no pushover. The instant the starting gun is fired, he takes off like a shot.
Who wins? To everyone’s surprise, the race is a photo finish – an exact tie! And here's where a seeming paradox comes in. According to the clock on the sidelines, the tortoise and the hare moved at exactly the same speed. They both started exactly on the gun shot and crossed the finish line at exactly the same instant. But let's imagine traveling that “same speed" in each of their “worlds.”
In the tortoise’s immense world, the motion was a slow, easy movement of one foot. He simply lifted it up and slowly moved it forward. In the microscopic world of the mite sized hare, however, in order to get to the finish line at the same time, his motion was lightning fast. To travel that 100 yards in just one half second, he had to blast down the track, virtually like a bullet.
So the question is: Are these differences in motion only perceptions? Or, is the motion of an object somehow relative to it’s size?