Ok. In air, dependent on pressure, temperature, etc., shock waves, bullwhips, I get it. Ditto water.
In other materials, so-so. A strike (not necessarily producing a “ping”) also produces a shock wave–is that the right term?–measured in speed of sound. Why do they call that wave sound?
In plasma–which I looked up in Wik–it’s used at the atomic level. I have no clue.
Any help?
Mostly has to do with density, isn’t it? So, the speed of sound in a long steel beam is higher than the speed of sound in water, and in water faster than in air.
If your plasma or other gas were under super high compression (would it still be a gas?) the speed of sound might get really high.
In very rigid solids the speed of sound can be quite a bit higher than in air. Here’s a table that shows some sample values. It gives the SoS in diamond as 12,000 m/s - about 35 times the SoS in air.
previous thread implies that in a neutron star it could approach the speed of light.
Is this your homework?
We call “sound” a wave that would excite the human auditory system. So your question should be: how fast can a wave travel that can still be detected by the human ear?
No, and no.
Great thread, that, thanks. It covers basically the question–except for the plasma one.
One of the respondents defined sound as “basically the speed of stuff bouncing against stuff.” Is it because of the ingrained response that it refers to air-based–and human sensed-- phenomena that makes me uncomfortable with the term?
For the second “no”, you’ll have to define how the initial vibration is created, what is it that is vibrating, and what is the material through the vibration is propagated.
The upper limit, of course, would be light and the speed of light accordingly.
It’s just a wave, not a shock. And it’s the same kind of wave as a sound wave, a lateral compression wave.
Back to your OP, I gather that you’re asking what material has the highest sound speed? The answer, then, is probably a photon gas (or I suppose a graviton gas), in which case the sound speed is c/sqrt(3).
As an aside, I wonder: There’s no reason one couldn’t also have a phonon gas in some material, and one could have soundlike disturbances in that phonon gas. One would then have a sound propagating through a medium which was itself composed of sound.
[quote=“Chronos, post:9, topic:605236”]
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sqrt(3) to account for 3-d spread?