If we (humans) and light can travel freely through the vacuum of space, then why does sound need a medium to travel through something and can’t travel in space?
In: Physics
Because sound isn’t a thing. You’re made of water and carbon and a bunch of other things, and those things can be physically placed in space.
Light is made of photons. Photons are weird, but they’re there.
Sound isn’t *stuff*. It’s not made of anything. What we call sound is really just vibrations in stuff. So sound can travel through stuff (if you make something vibrate, the vibrations will spread out through that something), but it can’t travel through an absence of stuff. In space, there’s nothing to vibrate.
Sound isn’t a particle. Sound is the vibration of molecules that are already there in the air. That’s why sound can’t travel in space, because in space, there isn’t any matter/molecules to make any vibrations. Sound is really kind of cool sense that we have. We hear it as sound, but really we’re interpreting the vibration of the molecules in the atmosphere around us. That’s why sound travels slower than light. Because light is an actual particle, called photons. It travels well…… at the speed of light. Sound is like, comparable to having a gush of air hit you. Similar but not really, but just trying to explain like you’re 5 😉
I’m in no way qualified to make this statement, but I was always under the impression that sound came in the form of waves. These waves travel through particles in the air. Earth’s air is made up of oxygen and other gases to make it’s atmosphere, and when a noise happens within this atmosphere, the sound reverborates through the particles in the air on it’s way to you. In space, or even in a vacuum, there are no particles of anything to carry the sound to you, making it impossible to hear anything in space
Sound is not really real. Sound is just how your brain handles vibrations that it detects. The only ‘real’ part of sound is vibrations. Vibrations need to travel through something. Vibrations cannot travel through space, because there is basically nothing to vibrate.
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