José P's Blog

We all know Star Wars right? A common theme is battles in space with big ships blasting at each other. However, if the movies were based on actual science, you wouldnt hear anything. There's always big booms and laser sound effects, but if you think about it, sound cannot travel through space. Sound is a longitudinal wave, and can be looked at as such:

::: : : ::: : : ::::

Longitudinal waves need a medium to travel through, and since space is nothing more than a vacuum, there is no medium, and therefore no sound could travel. Then Star Wars would be really boring, huh? Good thing George Lucas neglected his physics class. You should't though!

I just thought it was very interesting to apply what I learned in physics to real life. I was interning in a recording studio last night and got a "physics rush" if you will. We put a condensor mic and a dynamic mic in front of a Vox amplifier and noticed that it didn't get too good sound. So I learned that if you just switch the soundwaves of one of the mics 180 degrees out of phase, it will match up with the other mic and make the guitar sound a lot better and fuller. The sound waves of the two mics weren't perfectly insync with each other so turning the phases around really helped

One of my favorite movies is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II Secret of the Ooze. One of the final battle scenes shows Mikey hitting a chored on a key-tar (keyboard shaped like a guitar) and the loud sound it creates sends the evil-doer Shredder flying across the building. I've always wondered how this could happen. I've played my fair share of extremely loud amplifiers before with no such effect. After doing some thinking on this, it is apparent that sound waves cannot simply transform into shockwaves. After watching the scene many many times, i realized that it must have simply been the explosion of the amplifier that sends Shredder flying with shockwaves. Shockwaves send a sort of expansion fan that causes objects to move. Sound waves cannot move things.