And why is it about 343 ms/s in air?
In: Engineering
Sound propagates (spreads) through a medium. Something that can ‘carry’ it essentially.
Sound is vibrations in the air, and the density (how ‘solid’ it is) of the medium primarily dictates how quickly you can essentially ‘vibrate’ it with other vibrations. The speed of sound is dictated simply by how quickly those vibrations can in turn vibrate other things through a medium, it’s just that our most common medium sound travels through is air, so we say that the speed of sound is roughly 340-350m/s
At sea level, it’s about 340ms.
In solid objects like metal, you can get up to multiple KM/S, like being able to hear a train coming when you put your ear to the track but it’s miles away.
In something like space it’s 0 because there’s not much of anything to bump into anything else to propagate the sound.
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