I thought that sound waves effectively were a series of compressions within the medium they were travelling through. This could well be wrong.
In: Physics
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m surprised by the answers that (correctly) indicate that water is slightly compressible. While that’s true, I think that sound would propagate instantly in a fully incompressible medium (which I guess means there is no such thing as fully incompressible medium).
Take a piece of hypothetically incompressible matter (I don’t know, think diamond, but harder I guess), put it against the drum of a microphone and exert variable pressure on it. What would happen? The drum would move and the microphone would record sound.
You don’t need a medium to be compressible for pressure on one end to propagate to the other.
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