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Exuse me if this is the wrong sub-forum, but oh well.

I was 'howstuffworks.com'-ing when I fell into an article about light, and how it is in waves and has frequencys and all that jazz, and then I decided to look up sound. I started thinking, no one has proved that sound isn't in waves, right?(Exuse me if im wrong Im rather new to the physics world) My question is; Are light and sound the same thing? If I took a speaker and ramped it up to impossible lengths, would I see the 'sound'?

You wouldn't see the sound per se, as sound is simply longitudinal pressure waves through the air; however, the pressure waves would refract light, and you would see a distortion effect.

As for light and sound being the same thing: No. They both exhibit wavelike properties, but they are quite different phenomena. As mentioned above, sound waves are longitudinal pressure waves. They're the same type of waves that pass through a slinky. Whereas light waves are transverse waves, which are like the waves that pass through a string or rope when you shake one end.



You can think of sound waves as simple vibrations through a medium. Light waves, on the other hand, are a bit more complicated. They were discovered by studying the effects of electric current densities acting as sources for both magnetic fields and time varying electric fields. Scientists (one scientist, Maxwell, in particular) fiddled around with some maths and discovered that a changing electric field is all you need to induce a changing magnetic field and visa versa. The electric and magnetic fields can interact with one another, and their interactions propagate outwards at the speed of light (regardless of any motion of a source or observer). These interactions are light waves. The scientific theory that deals with light waves is called 'electromagnetism'.



No. The interpretation of light became more complicated with the discovery of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, light is actually described as a particle called a 'photon'. Photons have a holistic mathematical wave function associated with them. if string theory is true, then string "vibrations" would be responsible for photons, but they are certainly not directly responsible for light waves.

Sound travels much slower than light, as well. We've broken the sound barrier before, but not the speed of light.