Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: McKay on 13/09/2014 22:57:52
-
Greetings. I got confused. Perhaps someone can illuminate me on this one:
If I am standing next to a railway made for sonic trains and one train, a long train, is passing by, with sound waves, naturally, propagating all around the inside of the train - if I could see the variations in air pressure that are the sound wave and I would look at one particular wave traveling in the opposite direction of the train itself ( to the back), would I be looking at a, relative to me, unchanging pressure difference?
( of course, speed of sound changes in different mediums and pressures, but, in this case, the train would be traveling at the speed of sound of its inside (?) )
-
Sound travels at a speed relative to it's medium, in this case, about 330m/s relative to the speed of the air.
If a hypothetical train were traveling at the speed of sound towards the right (carrying it's internal air with it), and a sound wave inside the train were propagating towards the rear of the carriage, an outside observer would see it as a stationary pressure wave (assuming a hypothetical observer could see variations in air pressure).
This does not happen for light propagating in a vacuum, which always seems to be traveling at the same speed relative to any observer; we call this speed "c".
-
Ok, I knew about light propagation, but as I said: I got confused when thinking about sound. It seems very weird that a sound wave would appear stationary.
Thank you.
Speaking of seeing sound waves - cant an observer actually see (detect) different pressure pockets by analyzing light refraction, preferably from a laser?
-
You can see the change of refractive index thusly: