Why would'nt this work?
Why would'nt this work?
It can look dumb, but I always had this question as a kid, what physical principles would prevent this?
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227 comments
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Even if it were perfectly rigid, supernaturally so, your push would still only transmit through the stick at the speed of light. The speed of light is the speed of time.
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The push would travel at the speed of sound in the stick, much slower than the speed of light
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In a "perfectly rigid" stick (a fictional invention), the speed of sound is the speed of light.
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Sound is air vibration
Sound is not exclusive to air, it can be generalized to vibrations in any media. Whale song and dolphin echolocation are certainly sounds, and we're almost always talking about them propagating in water rather than air.
which has to travel from one place to the next
No, that isn't how sound works. In air this would be a description of wind, not sound.
just transfer kinetic energy to the adjacenct atom
This is actually a good description of how sound waves propagate.
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It's still called the speed of sound. Your intuition is correct in that it's much higher for solid things, but it's still much slower than the speed of light.
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227 comments