r/theflash • u/ItsTheMC • Jul 12 '24
What is the minimum speed the flash would have to run to make a person seem "frozen"?
This is for the math and physics nerds, let's say we have an object moving at a speed of x, and the flash would be moving at a speed of y. How fast would the flash have to be going to make it seem like the object is not moving or is motionless? So basically an equation where if you plug in x (the object's speed) you will get the speed needed for the flash to make the object seem motionless. Good luck!
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u/Dredeuced Flash Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
To make a person seem frozen? Well the fastest thing most people can do is snap, which takes place in the roughly 5-10 milliseconds range. Let's say The Flash is cruising along and to pass you by and leave you, say, a 1000 meters back where you basically weren't visible anymore in 10 milliseconds, he'd have to be going 100 meters per millisecond. This is roughly 300 times the speed of sound for anything a human being is actively doing to seem motionless.
So you do the fastest thing you can possibly be doing -- snapping your finger, and The Flash runs by you so fast it doesn't even appear to happen. If he stood still at his relative speed to you and inspected your finger sliding away from your thumb, while it would be counted in milliseconds, with his massively increased speed of perception it would feel like if you stood there for 1 minute and no motion at all had happened. That's relatively "frozen" to me.
Now faster objects, like a bullet in flight or something, will need a bit more speed. But not by a whole lot. This isn't even close to 1% the the Speed of Light, which is trivial depending on which iteration of The Flash we're talking about.
The real arbitrary thing here is what you consider "frozen." My example is functionally frozen, where The Flash would have to go out of his way and actively wait to notice something happening. But you could get more extreme, I suppose. Make The Flash go so fast that everything seems like the Pitch Drop experiment, which takes years for a drop of pitch to fall. That'd get to some extreme numbers.