confusion about Relativity

Hey there. As an undergraduate student in math and engineering, I think I can help clarify this. It's been a long time since I've seen the movie in high school, but I can remember a few important things.

Clockstoppers does have some major plot holes, but none where relativity is involved. The idea behind the "speeding up" process simply speeds up the molecules of an object. For this, brain functions, muscles, and the electrical impulses that travel around the body and control them are all technically sped up. This gives them extremely high reaction times and the ability to fully perceive events that occur in very short time spans.

Relativistic effects would occur when an object that is sped up starts walking or running, moving relative to the rest of the earth. If their molecules are moving fast enough for a considerable walking speed, then they may notice drastic changes in the speed of the world around them, increasing or decreasing depending on their own walking speed.

One must be traveling at a considerable percentage of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) relative to the rest of the earth before noticeable relativistic time and space dilation effects occur. If one is traveling at a tenth of the speed of light, about 18,600 miles per second, time around them would seem to be progressing 0.5 percent faster (probably not even enough to notice). At half the speed of light at 93,000 miles per second, time around them would increase by 15 percent. That would certainly be a more noticable change. At 90 percent of the speed of light, roughly 167,000 miles per second, time would be traveling about twice as fast around them; absolutely a noticeable change.

The catch is that the guys in Clockstoppers are not sped up as fast or even close to the speed of light. The scene where the sprinkler emits "very slowly" moving water, I.E. about a tenth of a foot per minute, shows this. Let's assume that the water is coming out of the sprinkler in "real" time at about 25 miles per hour. That is 2200 feet per minute. In order for the guys in Clockstoppers to perceive water moving at 2200 feet per minute as water moving slowly at 0.1 feet per minute, they must be sped up about 20,000 times faster. That means that their normal walking speed of, say, 4 miles per hour would turn into 80,000 miles per hour relative to the world. This is about 20 miles per second.

Even though they may be walking at 20 miles per second relative to the rest of the earth (which is very fast, don't get me wrong), that speed is WELL below what is necessary for any meaningful time dilation. Time around them would only be 0.0000006 percent faster... and that would not be noticeable in any way.

Keeping in mind that their perception abilities have changed (so they perceive everything as being slow), any changes in relativity that may occur would only speed up the pre-existing slowness they see. That means that the world's time would have to speed up due to relativity about 20,000 times before it would even appear that the world is once again moving at the same rate as the Clockstoppers, much less speeding around them. This would require them to travel at 0.99999999857 times the speed of light (almost, but not quite there!). That would be essentially impossible, for the energy required to accelerate someone to such a speed would probably constitute more energy that has been consumed by humans throughout all of history.

This is also related to an interesting side note; when an object is sped up to colossal speeds approaching light, it gains mass and becomes much, much heavier. The faster an object moves, the heavier it becomes (it becomes harder and harder to accelerate it towards the speed of light). The Clockstoppers would be so heavy at speeds that close to light that they would be instantly crushed by their own weight the moment they moved a muscle.

Their brains would also not be able to send signals to other parts of the brain or the rest of the body fast enough for the body to work properly, since nothing can travel faster than light and things are getting pretty fast already... brain functions would start to slow down a LOT.

Since they aren’t traveling this fast after all, none of the things I spoke of just now would happen. However, moving 10-30 miles per second is still an amazing feat in itself, and would still result in very strange behaviors in physics!

Just one example: the scene where they pick up that dog and move it into a car is pretty silly. The act of touching the dog with hands moving at a speed like that would break all of the dogs ribs and rip though its spinal column... a hand would pass through it or most other objects as easily as a knife through butter, instantly destroying whatever it touches due to massive accelerations and frictions. Spoken another way with a different example, slightly touching someone's skin would result in that skin scraping off, kind of like... er... ever see House of Wax? :)

I am sure that there are plenty of other things that I could go into, such as drag, heat diffusion, the speed of sound... but, in the end, it's a movie. If you are reading this and enjoyed that movie, don't let me try to ruin it for you. :D It's just interesting for me to think of the physics behind things like Clockstoppers, though. Who knows, maybe someone will write something else that takes some of these things into account, and it would be integral to the plot! Moviemakers build on the backs of giants after all.