If electricity is faster than the speed of sound why does it not make a sonic boom?
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Have you ever heard thunder?
Thunder. It’s what happens when electricity moves through air rather than a wire.
Though, in this case the electricity is heating the air so rapidly that it crashes into other air molecules as the gas expands violently.
A sonic boom is the result of air compression from an object accelerating beyond the speed of sound. Electricity doesn’t move through air like a jet plane. It conducts through wires. No air is being compressed. No boom.
Electrical conduction is less like screaming so loud they hear you in the next town and more like making a phone call, where the sound of your voice is carried bit by bit along the wire. Sound is moving molecules forward. An electric current does not push molecules forward, but passes charge from atom to atom faster and farther than a single electron can move great distances.
As a counterexample, the boom of thunder is NOT the sound of electrons moving through the air. Thunder is the sound of air moving away from the electrical current because the air got HOT (50,000F) instantly. Thunder is a sonic boom, but because of heat not electricity. Thunder is technically the same as the sound of a bomb, which has no electricity at all.
Electrons have virtually no mass. So little that they’re generally considered mass-less. No mass, no effect on physical material such as air no sonic boom. It’s the same reason light doesn’t cause sonic booms as it goes through the atmosphere.
Ever heard the thunder from lightening? Normally it moves through wires not air.
ELY5, electricity doesn’t move the air when travelling through wire, it will create that sonic boom when it travels through air (lightning and thunder)
Ever hear thunder?
Okay, it’s not exactly the same thing – thunder is thermal expansion of air caused by the movement of large quantities of electricity, ie lightning. Sonic booms are the rapid displacement of air caused by solid objects moving through it at high speed – but both are waves created by the movement of their respective objects.
Sonic booms come from a large object moving at very high speeds through air. Lightning is actually very tiny and has very little mass, but the heat that it creates as it travels through air causes similar displacement and noise.
Electricity can DEFINITELY make a sonic boom, it just has to be traveling through the air, but it happens all the time:
https://www.noaa.gov/jetstream/lightning/sound-of-thunder/learning-lesson-determining-distance-to-thunderstorm#:~:text=Overview,generating%20a%20%22sonic%20boom%22.
“Thunder is a result of the rapid expansion of super heated air caused by the extremely high temperature of lightning. As a lightning bolt passes through the air, the air expands faster than the speed of sound, generating a “sonic boom”.
**Why would it?**
The way to look at this question is first what causes a sonic boom. First like of the wikipedia page is “A [sonic boom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom) is a sound associated with shock waves created when an object travels through the air faster than the speed of sound.”
Electricity isn’t an object and it’s not traveling through the air, so it’s not causing shockwaves.
Light travels way faster than the speed of sound, but not as “an object”. Photons pass through the air.
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