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

    • Dragon Rider (drag)
      link
      fedilink
      English
      221 month ago

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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        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.