Why dont bugs that are in your car stick to the back of the window when your going fast?

Question

Why dont bugs that are in your car stick to the back of the window when your going fast. Even when you drop a pieces of paper is still floats with your car even when your going 70 mph.

this sounds stupid but do you create your own gravity or something.

Answer 1

there is no net force acting on the objects in the car, you can go as fast as you want but you still can't make the bug stick to the back window.

Answer 2

there isnt any wind pushing anything around

completely remove the front part of your car so that its open to everything

and see how things will fly to the back of your car

Answer 3

The air in which the bug is flying is being carried along at the same speed as the car.  The bug is moving only relative to the air, so there is minimal difference in the relative speeds of car and bug.  Therefore no splatteroony.

Answer 4

Here's what's happening inside a car with closed windows:

When the car's velocity is constant (at rest, or at constant speed in a straight line), the occupants inside the car move with the car and experience no net acceleration.  The same is true for the mass of air inside the car.

When the car's velocity changes (say, accelerating at 3 m/s^2), the inertia of the objects in the car (humans, bugs, air) tries to keep them moving at the same speed.  The seats run into the back of the humans, exerting a net force on them and causing them to speed up, matching the acceleration of the car.

Meanwhile, the rear seats and window run into the mass of air and push it forward with the same acceleration.  The air pushes on the bugs, but with much less efficiency (due to air not being a particularly solid object).  The bug will slip backwards briefly relative to the car, but because bugs are small, they can achieve high acceleration while flapping their wings.  It takes only a few wing beats for the bug to make up the change in velocity and remain in the same place (relative to the car).

If your car were capable of accelerating at 10 times Earth gravity (10g = 98.1 m/s^2), many bugs would indeed get stuck to the back window.

Answer 5

If the above explanations haven't helped:

One of the basic principles of the universe we live in is this: that the laws of physics are exactly the same when you are moving at a constant, uniform speed in a straight line, as they are when you're standing still. So, if you decide to play basketball on a train, inside a moving train, the basketball will fly just the way it would if you were on the ground. (Except that train rides are sometimes a bit bumpy, and sometimes go through curvy tracks or speed up or slow down, which violates the whole "constant, uniform speed in a straight line." But on a long straightaway, if the ride isn't too bumpy, you can play basketball just fine.

This is why you don't feel the spinning of the earth, by the way.

When you run into a fly, it's outside your frame of reference, and it's not moving relative to the ground. So you run into it at 70 mph, and of course it splats.

But when a fly is in your car, it sped up with you, and you're now both going at 70 mph. So long as that speed remains constant, it doesn't splat into the car, because the laws of physics are no different for a fly buzzing around inside a 70 mph car as they are from a fly buzzing around at rest relative to the ground.

This property of the laws of physics is called "the special principle of relativity." On a technical level, nobody knows *why* it is true. Part of the reason is probably because it's hard to identify a "center" of the universe, or a reference frame that's at "absolute rest".