And why is it about 343 ms/s in air?
In: Engineering
Sound is a mechanical wave. It is literally things bumping into one another. Usually, those things are molecules of air, but it could also be molecules of water (why you can still hear under water), or molecules of string (how a tin can phone works). There is a “speed” of sound as it takes times for each one of those molecules to move and bump into the next one. The speed of sound varies and is directly related to the density of the medium it’s traveling through — in other words, how tightly packed the molecules are. The speed of sound in air actually varies depending on the density of the air which can be changed due to elevation, temperature, and barometric pressure.
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