Thanks for the answers guys, but I still don’t really understand how sound can go at the speed of light, and IMO I think it took a lot longer than we think.
Don’t believe me? Imagine we have no advanced tech that we have today, and across world voice calls don’t exist. Imagine how fucking difficult it would be to make the sound of your voice go at light speed across Earth.
For example imagine you’re at a park with your friend and across world vc’s don’t exist. You’re speaking to each other through the pipe with the two cups at each end, and you want to invent a way to communicate across the world
The fact they did it is awesome. It sounds impossible. And at the time I have no doubt the majority of the world thought it was impossible. But we always think it’s impossible, until it’s invented.
OP below
I always thought that the sound travels at the speed of light but then it hit me that it’s not light, it’s sound, so I had to post this.
OP above
Edit: It’s technically still sound though right? Just converted into something else.
Just because it’s converted into a different form doesn’t mean it’s not sound. It’s just sound in a different form, or it wouldn’t be sound at the other end.
Who was the first person to convert sound to the speed of light?
Edit2: I still think there’s something you’re not telling me guys 🤔😂
Edit3: to the few haters who downvoted my reply to the comment when I said ‘no shit’ when someone compared this to paper travelling at the speed of light, get a brain. Sound doesn’t weigh anything.
Edit4: u/mitchrsmert fr? If sound has mass how can it travel at the speed of light?
In: 627
No, actually it’s no longer sound; phones transform the sound into electricity, and electricity travels at the speed of light (minus whatever delays or lag are caused by the equipment / the electronics). At the other end, the other person’s phone transforms the electrical signals back into sound.
It’s not instant, there’s actually a noticeable delay when speaking to Australia. And if you look at some of the NASA footage, when speaking to the Moon or trying to connect to the rovers on Mars or the probes further out, there’s *significant* delay, up to hours of it.
[Speed of light](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AAU_btBN7s).
>Edit: It’s technically still sound though right? Just converted into something else.
Just because it’s converted into a different form doesn’t mean it’s not sound. It’s just sound in a different form, or it wouldn’t be sound at the other end.
This indicates that the other (very good) explanations here just aren’t clicking for you yet, so let me try a slightly different approach.
Imagine that there are two people in soundproof booths, say, 100 yards/meters apart. They’re communicating over walkie-talkies. You stand right in the middle between them.
You hear nothing, right? That’s because sound isn’t traveling past you at all. Sound travels from the person speaking to their walkie-talkie, and from the other walkie-talkie to the listener. But between the walkie-talkies there is no sound traveling; it’s just radio waves.
This is why radios and phone calls never sound as good (in terms of pure audio quality) as a live performance or conversation: because you’re not actually hearing the person speaking, you’re hearing an imperfect attempt to reproduce their voice using the electromagnets in your speaker.
It’s the same as one of the reasons your cell-phone photo of, say, the Grand Canyon doesn’t look as good as actually seeing the canyon in person; your phone isn’t showing you the canyon, it’s showing you a low-resolution attempt at reproducing the view of the grand canyon.
This is why a fax is called a fax. It’s short for “facsimile” because when you receive a fax, you’re receiving a attempted reproduction based on the data transmitted, rather than the original document itself.
TL;DR Sound isn’t traveling that distance. Electromagnetic (or optical) signal is.
Sound is a bunch of waves moving through a gas (like the atmosphere) or a liquid (like water) or even solid objects like rocks (how earthquakes get detected). It’s speed can change depending on what it’s moving through.
When you speak into your phone though you’re actually making what would looks like a tiny speaker move back and forth matched to the vibrations of your sound waves. A copper wire is wrapped around that moving speaker, and a magnet is wrapped around that whole thing. This lets those back and forth vibrations convert into electrical waves, as just simple electricity. Now you send that over wires or fiber optics anywhere in the world. Even wirelessly into space or from your phone to a cell tower. On the receiving end is an actual speaker, just like the one you spoke into (the microphone). The electrical waves make the magnet move the copper coiled wire which moves the speaker in the same vibration pattern your voice made into the microphone. Which let’s it reproduce the sound on that end, just as you spoke it.
It’s not instant, but it’s fairly close. Fiber optics would be the quickest, since that’s visible light in the cable. Electricity would be second, and you have to account for the time it takes the microphone and speaker to physically move. If sending wirelessly then it’s turned into radio waves, which is the signal your phone gets from the towers sending them. Your phone connects to a tower, sends/receives the signal, from the tower it goes into wires buried underground and through the oceans. Until it reaches the receiving tower and goes back into radio waves to connect to the other phone you’re talking to. Similar situation for your internet access. There are literally fiber optic cables that physically run around the entire globe, connecting almost every continent together.
Also the way we figured how to do all of this was by starting out with just using electrical signals. Morse code being sent through a telegraph. It’s literally just on or off, open the circuit or close the circuit. How long or short you keep that circuit open it closed gets translated to a letter. String a combination of those open or closed codes together and you can spell words. The invention of the speaker diaphragm (the part moving in and out with the copper wrapped around it and a magnet around that) is what let use upgrade that same system to then make sounds instead of just an on or off code.
Also in general this concept is how all sound producing devices work. Speakers, headphones, etc. The only difference being that the audio got recorded and saved somewhere first, and then played back at a later time.
All of this works because both sound and electricity are in the form of waves. That’s how you can convert between the two. You just make one mimic the other.
[removed]
About your edits: imagine you use your phone to take a picture of a painting. Sure, technically what you’re taking a picture of is paint, but your phone lens just senses the light that reflects off of the painting. It then has a sensor that can convert that light into electrical signals and store it in a computer-readable format: ones and zeros. Then you send that picture to a friend over the internet. Their phone knows how to decode that series of ones and zeros and how to display the picture on the screen, which pixels need to take on which colour.
You could say something similar about phone signals.
Your getting caught up on the sound part. Sound travels as a wave. So does light and a bunch of other things too. Not all waves are created equal, they all move at different speeds depending on the medium they are moving through and how much energy they have. Sound waves (usually) move through air and they don’t have very much energy behind them compares to other types of waves. That is why we convert sound waves into a faster type of wave over long distances, and we moderate the material through which the wave travels. Electrical signals traveling through a wire travel faster than the sound waves through air. And radio waves through air (or better yet a vacuum) travel faster still. We can’t make the speed of a sound wave travel any faster but we can take the pattern of that sound wave and replicate it in another, faster traveling type of wave.
A turtle is slow, but if you put it on top of a ferrari, it’s fast. Here’s another sentence, as one-sentence answers are removed automatically here.
It’s not transformed into light though. You’re taking assumptions and applying the wrong logic to it. You’re acting like you’ve found some flaw in the way telephones work as if there’s some kind of conspiracy?
Alexander Graham Bell facilitated and was credited the invention and first international phone call in 1877. Its an electromagnetic telephone. Elisha Gray and Antonio Meucci were the first to make the “talking telegraph” despite Bell being the first to patent it.
>I always thought that the sound travels at the speed of light but then it hit me that it’s not light, it’s sound, so I had to post this.
Has to be great to grow up in a climate without thunderstorms, else you would have known this.
A human travels 2miles per hour, if you put the human in a car, he can travel 70 miles in an hour.
Sounds travels by itself in air is slow about 761 mile per hour. But sounds travel carried by electric signal in wires or optical signal in fiber cables are much much faster. Close to the speed of light.
Latest Answers