It can look dumb, but I always had this question as a kid, what physical principles would prevent this?

  • Dragon Rider (drag)
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    441 month ago

    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.

      • Dragon Rider (drag)
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        221 month ago

        In a “perfectly rigid” stick (a fictional invention), the speed of sound is the speed of light.

        • @[email protected]
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          101 month ago

          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.

        • JackbyDev
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          11 month ago

          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.