What If Time Slowed Down and Couldn't Stop?

A summer evening, a sunshower on your street, 7:42 pm. Then time out there starts slowing down, and it never stops. You stay at normal speed. Every sound drops lower and disappears. The rain stops in the air. A pickup's splash freezes beside your mailbox. Up in the storm, lightning starts coming down, and you walk up the street to watch the whole strike, one step of it at a time. The readout is how long one second out there lasts for you. The numbers are real. Rain falls at about 18 mph, so at ten times slower it falls like snow. A ruby-throated hummingbird beats its wings about 53 times a second. Below 20 vibrations a second you hear nothing, so at a thousand times slower every sound is gone. Sound moves at about 774 mph and you walk at about 3 mph. A stepped leader comes down in jumps of tens of millionths of a second at about 450,000 mph. Sparks rise from tall things to meet it. The return stroke climbs at a third of the speed of light, at about 50,000 °F, five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Light crosses 134 feet in a seventh of a millionth of a second, which is why you see the strike seven seconds after it happens. Some of it is not real. We let you walk and breathe; in air that slow you couldn't. We kept the light normal until near the end. Really, slowed light reaches you stretched toward red: at only twice as slow the world would already have started going dark. The film says so on screen when the light turns red. The speed of the splash, the exact shape of the lightning and how fast the light fades at the very end are our choices. The last thing that happens is made up. You stood in one second for ten minutes. Out there, it's still 7:42. CHAPTERS 0:00 Your street 0:44 The silence 1:08 The lightning leaves the cloud 1:16 The walk 2:48 The church 3:35 The sparks 4:42 The strike 4:49 Its light reaches you 5:48 Light at a walking pace 6:45 Your house HASHTAGS #whatif #science #lightning #slowmotion #physics