– if I clap next to a flying gnat it is stunned and falls to the ground, why is that?
In: 11
You’re huge compared to the gnat. Wouldn’t a bomb going off next to you stun you as well?
Sound is a pressure wave, moving through a medium, like an ocean wave moving through water. Sound has a physical impact, and you made a VERY loud sound quite close to an absolutely tiny organism.
If a giant clapped a few cm away from you, it might literally kill you, just rupture eardrums and bowels, collapse lungs and so on. The fact that the gnat is only stunned is really a testament to invertebrate biology.
Super ELI5 version: You basically smacked it with sound.
Disrupted the air around it, basically, and probably the fast movement from the force of the clap against the tiny thing is like hitting it, you would probably get the same if it was something like a sonic boom, or a large explosion.
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