Driving Slow Feels Fast

Rowdy’s a little “rough,” with her scrapes and scuffs and dents here and there on the hood, trunk lid, and rear panels. Her eBay-sourced ruby red mid-roof and mirrors contrast with the black gloss paint (what there is of it) in an affront to civility. Her stance is low, as if to say, “You know I could if I wanted to.”

Black wheels, big tires. Enough said about that.

And the sound she makes is, well, let’s just say her voice would be husky and not quite too loud at the local watering hole where she’d be drinking tequila.

She’s quick, but the weird thing is, she doesn’t have to go all that fast to be fun. Last evening as I drove home from a restaurant, I looked down and realized I was going about 60 mph. It felt like 80 in the thrumming, low-slung, two-seat sports car.

I think my athletic Subaru is faster, and the “silently extraordinary” electric Hyundai definitely is. Speed depends on one’s “frame of reference.”

Actually, that’s really true, though questioning reality has been a hobby for decades.

You see that “60 mph” three paragraphs above? 60 miles per hour. Just two units of measurement, right? Miles and hours. We all know what those are. Yeah?

Maybe not so much.

To steal a common example, let’s say Rowdy was parked at that restaurant. I stretch out my arm and drop a tennis ball from four feet above the pavement. It takes about a second to both fall and bounce back up into my hand. Down and up, eight feet, in one second, 8 feet per second.

But if I leave the restaurant and am driving 60 mph and drop the tennis ball from the same four feet (ignore the wind), someone standing on the side of the road will see the ball travel 88 feet in that one second.

More than ten times faster.

And if I was driving due east toward home, because of the earth’s spin, someone out in space would see the ball travel a little less than 1,200 feet per second.

What was always bizarre to me was that every one of those speeds is “right.” The ball is traveling at 8 feet per second, 88 feet per second, and 1,200 feet per second at the same time. Depending on your “frame of reference.”

There are other frames of reference, of course. A nearly infinite number, I’d suppose, but I don’t want to work that hard. The key, here, is to really grasp that each and every one of them is “true.”

It just goes to show what they say: What you see depends on what you look at, and where you stand when you’re doing the looking. The observer is part of the equation.

And just to bend this a little farther, at really high “relative speeds,” let’s say at 90% of the speed of light, even time changes. That one second might slow down to several seconds for someone standing on the “side of the road.” That’s not intuitive because we never experience speeds that cause dilation of time.

But I wonder, at times (smile) if the “time” of “space-time” doesn’t expand and contract, maybe in waves, just like every other dimension. There are times, like when waiting for the lifted truck ahead of me to look up from his phone and see the light has turned green, it sure feels like it. I want to chuck this tennis ball at his rear window, but the tops of his tires are higher than my roof line. It’s all relative.

Driving Rowdy, a car that looks speedy just sitting still, is in many ways a time-altering event. On the road it feels like we’re moving so fast through my universe. The trip itself is always over too soon.

I suppose that’s relative, too.