Super speeders are everywhere these days. There’s The Flash and Quicksilver and that
other Quicksilver that isn’t the first Quicksilver (let’s not get into that). We know that
they all use their powers to zip around fighting bad guys but what I want to know is how they
listen to music.
More specifically I want to know how we are hearing anything at all in the coolest scene
of X-Men: Days of Future Past Present Past Future Participle.
What makes this Quicksilver scene so great is obviously the awesome slow-mo effects but
also the fact that the audience is taken along for the ride with help from Quicksilver’s
song of choice. But think about this for a second. How is he hearing music at a normal
speed in the span of the few milliseconds the whole scene actually takes?
At first I thought this was a question of relativity. I thought that the music could
play at the normal speed because the Walkman was attached to Quicksilver’s hip and moving
at the same speed that he was, so there’d be no weird time dilation or Doppler effects
with the music.
You can test this by falling from space.
Remember when Felix Baumgartner raised himself high up into the atmosphere in a capsule and
then stepped out to fall back to earth? Well, I do. It was cool.
When Felix Baumgartner dropped from the edge of space, his falling body broke the sound
barrier. He was moving beyond the speed of sound but he could still hear himself speak.
This is because the air in Baumgartner’s helmet was moving with him at the same speed.
And we can assume Quicksilver is in the same situation.
Quicksilver’s headphones keep pockets of air inside of his ears that move along with
him, so thankfully we can ignore any weird Doppler effects or the deafening rush of air
itself. So if we aren’t dealing with weird time
distortions or Doppler shifts, how can Quicksilver listen to his music in that scene?
Time for some math. First how long does Quicksilver have to save Erik and Charles?
Well the guards in the film are firing what look to be magnum revolvers, which have muzzle
velocities of around 450 meters per second. And of course the Internet has already estimated
the distance between the guards and our X-Men (link in the show notes), and it’s about
2.6 meters or so. So, with a bullet moving at that speed across
that distance it would give our heroes about 0.05 seconds to be saved by Quicksilver, or
about five times as fast as human reaction time.
Now for the music. Looking back, the whole Quicksilver scene
looks to last about 110 seconds, and in that time Quicksilver listens to the majority of
the song on his Walkman equivalent. Finally, to listen to 110 seconds worth of
music in only 0.05 seconds of real-time, Quicksilver would have to adjust his player to play at
1,800 times normal speed. Now let’s assume for a second that this
is actually possible, and that Quicksilver’s Walkman wouldn’t tear itself apart under
these tens of thousands of rpm (which it totally would). How does Quicksilver even understand
110 seconds worth of music in the time it takes for a normal person to actually understand
that they’re even listening to music?! Remember way back when to my very first Because
Science video on how The Flash can actually perceive more of time that we can? I think
Quicksilver has to operate the same way. For the same reason that time seems to slow
down for Quicksilver, a song playing in his head will as well no matter the speed. He
has a higher “frame rate” than us, he can sample more of the world than we can.
That is to say you could play a song back to Quicksilver at any speed and his brain
would give him the auditory resolution to hear it correctly.
So, the only reason that Quicksilver can understand auditory information coming off a cassette
tape going at 50 to a 100 thousand rpm is that his brain can process information as
quickly as he runs. At least we got to see the totally awesome slowed-down version of
that, and not the version where his clothes are blown off instantaneously by wind resistance,
cuz that would totally happen. Why? Because Science.
Want more science? Check out my last video on when we’re gonna run out of oil like
Mad Max. Subscribe to Nerdist for more videos. If you want Because Science two days earlier than anyone else,
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