Often the distance lightning strikes leaving a beautiful flash of light and then it's gone if you blinked or looked away you would have missed
It and never known it happened that is until the thunder rolls in
We all know that sound is slower than light and that's what creates the phenomenon of thunder lagging behind
Lightning and if you want to figure out exactly how far away a lightning strike is
There's a simple trick to use all you got to do is count
The seconds between the flash in the bang and for every 5 seconds that you count as a mile to the distance
actually it before point seven seconds if the air is already 70 degrees Fahrenheit and there's no humidity and all which means
that sound travels at about
760 miles per hour
But what does that look like?
By simply putting a camera on a car and then speeding up the footage in post
I can show you exactly what that looks like. If you are a sound wave traveling through the air
This would be your view the speed of sound is really fast
However, it's actually not that much faster than flying in a commercial airline
So going the speed of sound
wouldn't really reduce your flight times all that much the Concorde for instance used to fly from New York to London at twice the
Speed of sound and yet it still took three and a half hours to complete that journey
Wait, hold up though. What we're saying is the speed of sound through air
But what about the speed of sound through other things?
As it turns out the speed of sound is actually very different depending on what the medium is that the sound is traveling through
The primary thing that does determine the speed of sound through a medium is the stiffness of the material
The more rigid the object the faster sound will travel through it
Well technically density plays a factor too. The more dense the object the slower the sound
That is technically correct, but it doesn't play nearly as large of a role in determining the speed as the rigidity of the medium
Let's take water. For example
Yeah, it's all slushy and wet but it's still way more rigid than air and that's because you can't swim through the air
Duh, the speed of sound through water is over
3,300 miles per hour
In fact, it's one and a half times faster than the sr-71 blackbird a spy plane famous for being able to hit Mach three
That's that is fast man. The thing about water is that it is incompressible
Meaning that you can't squeeze it into a smaller space the same way you can with air and that's partly what helps sound waves travel
So much faster through water than through air
So it makes sense that sound gets progressively faster as you move from air to liquid to solid, right?
So let's compare that to steel steel is obviously way more stiff than water because it's a solid and a pretty hard solid at that
The speed of sound through steel is over
13,000 miles per hour which is 17 times faster than through air
And what's cool about that is if you're on some train tracks and an explosion goes off a mile away
You'll hear it twice first. You'll see the explosion, but then you'll hear it through the steel only a quarter second afterwards
That's really fast because through arrow take five seconds
Now imagine that these tracks are made out of rubber and you wanted to hear that same explosion a mile away
well
You'll be sitting here waiting about 26 seconds because rubber is one of the slowest mediums through which sound can travel it is five times
Slower through rubber than it is through air
The speed of sound through rubber is a hundred and thirty five miles per hour and that is so slow
I might even be able to reach it in my car
We go
Oh, yeah scary part is I can't really see what's ahead of me perpetual
20
We just 135 miles an hour we just wit Mach 1 through rubber
Let's imagine one of the fastest mediums
Diamond which is one of the hardest materials in existence thanks to its incredibly rigid carbon structure and that allows for it to transmit sounds
Absurdly fast we're talking
26,000 miles per hour which is 33 times faster than through air
But also more importantly that is faster than Earth's escape velocity
That means that if you are going that fast you would leave the Earth's
Gravity well and not come back because that's as fast as Rockets go when they visit other planets
Yeah, that's what escape velocity is now. Get out of my video
now before I in this video
I really wanted to compare each of these materials against each other to really show you just the vast
Range of speeds different materials can cause the speed of sound to be at the bottom of the pack
We have rubber here obviously rubber is faster than you would normally drive in a car
But it's still going to be super slow compared to any of the others in this category siliceous move on
This is air. This is something we're a little bit more used to so every five seconds of footage you see here
I'm going a mile down the road. So what you are actually seeing right now is the speed of sound for these shots
What I did was I drove exactly 55 miles per hour
I had my cruise control on and I went that fast for about eight miles and then I was able to speed that up to
Really demonstrate exactly how fast the speed of sound is?
Water is where we start really ramping things up. It's over four times faster than through air. So this clip will be four times shorter
Steel though this is where we get fast
and it's done and finally diamond which is so absurdly fast that it goes through eight miles like this and
Just like that. It was over
1.1 seconds, that's how long it takes the speed of sound to go eight miles through Diamond
1.1 seconds compared to three and a half minutes through rubber. That is just mind-boggling
And we've made it to the end of the video. Thank you so much for sticking with me here
I had a really good time exploring the different speeds. That sound can go if you thought this was interesting. I'd really appreciate it
If you shared it with your friends, maybe hit that like button
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