Is there a physics law according to which, in general, the smaller an object is, the faster it moves? [closed]

Question

I have always felt, in general, that dogs run faster than humans and that birds fly faster than dogs and than bees can fly or at least drift by the wind faster than birds and that plant seeds would drift faster than all these (while excluding exceptions such as turtles and snails moving by themselves).

• Going down further: When I have studied neuropsychology I discovered that anything a human can see or hear for example, is generally comprised of visual information fragments or audiological information fragments and that in one second the human nervous system has billions of peripheral and central neurons working together in astonishing speeds to present integrated and most likely meaningful information in the mind.

  • and further: When I studied enough about photons I understood they move in the speed of light which might be faster the the speed of an electric message moving on a neuronal axon, let along the speed of biosynthesizing a neurotransmitter.

    • and further: Quants might be randomly(?) changing their location faster than the speed of light.

As a non physicist or a formal student for physics I'd like to ask here:
Is there a physics law according to which, in general, the smaller an object is, the faster it moves?

Answer 1

There is no such law, because it isn't true. It isn't even remotely true.

Probably the most extreme counter example would be the earth itself, which hurtles around the sun at about 67,000 mph. I'd like to see your bee do this! (without riding on the back of the Earth, of course!)

And, of course, bees do not travel faster than birds. Bees travel about 15mph, while even pigeons can hit 70+mph. And plant seeds do quite literally drift slower than any actively flying thing, almost by definition (anything actively flying downwind will fly faster than the wind). Unless they manage to get their way into the jetstream, which is quite unrelated to their size.

Answer 2

The other answer is good and correct. As this is not a pure physics question I want to add something that relates to this, though: the scaling law. This is a very basic explanation why smaller animals are stronger relative to their size. This could explain why smaller animals tend to be faster or jump further (relative to their size).

The explanation is based on the fact that the force a muscle can produce is scaling with the cross section of the muscle, which is an area. However, the mass of the animal scales with its volume. Thus, the smaller an animal is, the better it's force/mass ratio is. That means it can accelerate better. Unfortunately for your observation it does not tell you anything about the max speed or about non-living things. When not too small, it should hold for robots though...

Edit: Given the muscle strength our muscles have, we can estimate a maximum size of an animal (with this muscle strength). At that size, it cannot accelerate anymore, at all. It is only slightly larger than the largest dinosaurs we found.