Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

This is not for a specific project for a class or anyting, its more like an extra credit project. But i was wodering if Sound can Drown out light. And if the light waves can drown out sound and how the diffrent waves and speeds of theses elements.

All I can do with this question would be to give you m y private thoughts on this. I am not an expert on light. I am not sure anyone is. We still do not understand a lot about the nature of light. We can measure its speed and even capture a tiny indication of mass for it but we still do not understand what it physically is made up of.

The speed of sound is 325 meters/second and the speed of light is 300,000,000 meters/second so light is roughly a million times faster than sound. Sound requires a medium such as air to exist whereas light requires no medium at all to travel. These two facts tell me that we are dealing with two different types of energy. Theoretically there should be some point where these two types of energy might have an effect on each other, but I know of no instance where they have been observed to do this.

Hi rdreeves,

prbeck provided an interesting perspective, but I wanted to add a few additional points. As prbeck pointed out, sound and light are two very different types of waves. Light is composed of photons, an elementary particle that acts as the carrier of the electromagnetic force. Photons have characteristics of both waves and particles. Sound waves are the result of pressure differences in a medium, like air, and are transmitted by molecular (or atomic) interactions in the medium. However, when light travels through certain materials that are excited by ultrasonic sound waves, the sound waves can actually "bend" (the technical term is "diffract") the light. There is an entire branch of physics called "acousto-optics" that deals with these types of interactions. You can learn more about this field by checking out the acousto-optics Wikipedia page and this website:

http://www.acoustooptic.com

If you would like some additional thoughts on this question, you will probably have more success on a different set of internet forums. These particular forums are specifically for students, parents, and teachers working on K-12 science projects.