If electricity is faster than the speed of sound why does it not make a sonic boom?
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It does. When lightning strikes. When the bolt of lightning moves through the air, it superheats it. The result is the air expands faster than the speed of sound and infact, millions of sonic booms are created, it is what we hear as thunder.
When you see something like a huge van de Graaf generator throwing huge arcing bolts of electricity, there are still sonic booms being created – it is what you hear when it crackles, however electricity has no mass as it is a form of energy and not matter. The crackles you hear are from the air expanding faster than sound, but because the electrical bolt is small it doesn’t elicit a big boom.
However when you look at *massive* objects, as in objects that have mass and are made of matter, then a sonic boom is different. It is literally the object travelling faster than the speed of sound and the sound barrier is literally broken, the air moves repeatedly from the front of the vehicle to the rear in an extremely violent event which creates the “boom” sound you hear.
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