That is just two ideas, it has got me thinking of a few more but I’ll need to test them first. Add a few drops of food colouring into each and see how the colour spreads out much faster in the hot water than in the cold. This back-and-forth longitudinal motion creates a pattern of compressions (high pressure regions) and rarefactions (low pressure regions). Particles of the fluid (i.e., air) vibrate back and forth in the direction that the sound wave is moving. To demonstrate how heated molecules vibrate more than colder ones (and hence infer that sound can travel faster through the more excited molecules) she could use a glass of hot water and a glass of ice cold water. Sound waves traveling through a fluid such as air travel as longitudinal waves. (obviously there is a safety element to consider with the lazer pen, always keeping it away from anyone’s eyes). This would use something visual to represent something we can’t actually see. At a guess she could use a little lazer pen to represent the sound coming from the bell and then she would have to work out how to angle the mirror (or mirrors if required) so that the lazer bounces and is redirected onto the person. She could use a mirror to demonstrate the refraction concept. I am really impressed with your daughters project plans! Off the top of my head I have a couple of suggestions… would she consider making a 3D model to demonstrate? She could have a sound source (like a little bell as in the diagram) and a person at some distance away.
These refracted sound waves can act to amplify the sound to someone standing far away. …if the air close to the ground is colder than the air above it then sound waves travelling upwards will be bent downwards. So there you have it sound does travel faster in warm air BUT it may appear to travel farther in cold air. Sound travels outwards from the source in all directions. for the domino model to really mimic the movement of sound you have to arrange the dominoes in concentric circles, not in straight lines.
This is because molecules in a solid medium are much closer together than those in a liquid or gas, allowing sound waves to travel more quickly through it.
Sound makes air molecules around the source vibrate and hit off the next molecule which vibrates and hits of the next (just like the dominoes hitting off each other) and the chain keeps going until the sound reaches your ear… and then the vibrations get carried on to your middle and inner ear until they are changed to electrical pulses that are sent to the brain!Īnd there was me thinking I was keeping this simple… back to the dominoes… just keep thinking of it like a string of dominoes. Which material does sound travel fastest through and why Solids: Sound travels fastest through solids. photo credit: Micah Taylor via photopin ccĪ good way to think of it is to imagine a line of dominoes. The formula for speed of sound is clearly flying in the face of this. Sound needs vibration in order to work so the sound is carried more easily through the air with the more excited molecules than through air with more “still” molecules (cold air). In high school (and almost all the youtube videos), we are often taught that sound travels faster in solid than air because solids are generally denser this allows the air particles to more readily collide with each other, thereby transmitting the energy more quickly. it does travel faster through warm air… the molecules in the warm air are more “excited” and will vibrate more easily. I gave him the short answer… it travels faster through warm air. I was asked this by the principal of a school I was visiting during Science Week last year. Generally, we tend to think particles in gases move faster and therefore sound travels faster in gases but this is wrong because sound is not carried by linear motion of particles instead it is carried along by vibrational motion of the particles.Sound waves don’t travel in space as there exist no medium in space.Does sound travel faster in warm or cold air? So, we can say that sound travels faster in solids than in liquids and slower in gases. Since molecules in solids are more densely packed than in molecules in liquid which are tightly packed than molecules in gases. Closer the molecules packed, higher will be the molecular collisions and similarly the speed of sound waves. Sound is a kind of disturbance which travels as a result of collisions between molecules in the medium. Sound waves travel by vibrating the molecules in the medium. This is one of the fundamental properties of sound. The media are solid, liquid, gas, and a vacuum, but not necessarily in that order. The speed of the wave varies as it travels.
The speed of sound waves depends on the medium through which the waves travel. A sound wave is produced and begins to travel from left to right through four different media. The speed depends on the Packing of molecules in the medium. Sound waves vibrate the molecules in the medium to move. The speed of sound depends on the medium through which the waves travel.