Recently I read a post by someone who could not understand why giants (like those protrayed in movies & TV shows) moved so slowly. He thought that they should be moving proportionally as fast as us normal sized people.
Reading this I could understand his vexation because it looks as though the giants are moving in slow motion. Why would this happen one might ask. Well, I've thought about this before and I think I have a good understanding on why this is.
Basically, the larger something is the farther it must move to equal a proportional move for us smaller folk. For instance: let's say I move my arm in a swinging motion and takes me 1 second. That covers only about 2 feet for me. But for a 100' tall giant the same move would cover perhaps 20'. That's ten times the distance. Since the laws of physics are the same for us both the giant should swing its arm at the same rate of speed, thus taking ten times the 1 second for a total of 10 seconds to make the move. Every move it makes covers more distance, but takes longer. It's just logical.
Another example is the moon. The moon is a huge object and yet it looks like it is barely moving. Though we know that it travels around the earth at about 2880 mph. This is because it is so far away--about 1/4 million miles away from us. Thus, large objects far away, although moving very fast can appear to be nearly not moving at all. If the moon moved in the sky like say for instance the way a basketball bounces here on earth it might look more normal to someone who didn't understand that the moon is much much larger than a basketball and very far away, but it would be hard to explain how it moved like this unless it was just a hologram (or something with no weight)
Perhaps one reason that some don't understand is because it is difficult to judge how far away something is if it is large and at a distance. For example, in UFO sightings where there are many witnesses it would not be unusual for there to be a wide range of accounts. Some might say that the object was 100 yards long and 1 mile away while others might say it was 50 feet long and 200 yards away. The human eye is not a good judge at distance perception especially when strange and unusual
objects are concerned. If you know what you're looking at you can judge better, but when UFOs are concerned this flys out the window. I say all this to try and prove a point. Our eyes are easily decieved and we must not jump to conclusions about what we see if we cannot be sure. To point this out also there is a TV show on the National Geographic channel all about this. It is called Brain Games. And it explores such things as optical illusions, memory, focus, etc.
Below, for both entertainment purposes and also as an example of what giants might look like, I've included a clip from the video game trailer Shadow of the Colossus. This is a game where the hero-a normal guy, along with his trusty sidekick horse, must find and defeat I think 16 colossus in a barren wasteland. In the video you see that the colossus as expected move proportionally slower than the normal size person.
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