- #1
Electrino
- 2
- 0
Hi,
I have a general question I was thinking about...
So, in a liquid the particles are already very close together and as a result they are, in effect, not compressible. That being said, if we take water, for example, it is possible to compress is slightly. It requires, however, a great deal of pressure to achieve very little volume reduction. For example the water at the bottom of the ocean is compressed by the weight of the water above it all the way to the surface, and is more dense than the water at the surface. So even though liquids can compress a tiny bit we cannot reduce the inter-molecular distance beyond a certain limit without changing its phase.
So my question is... If we had a container, filled with liquid, and we placed a small sound emitting speaker and noise detector into the liquid and then compressed the liquid as much as possible using a piston... would a sound wave (which is a compression of the medium it is in) be able to travel from the emitter to the detector?
Or would the liquid (which is already compressed to its max value) act almost like a perfectly rigid body and instantly dampen the sound wave?
I have a general question I was thinking about...
So, in a liquid the particles are already very close together and as a result they are, in effect, not compressible. That being said, if we take water, for example, it is possible to compress is slightly. It requires, however, a great deal of pressure to achieve very little volume reduction. For example the water at the bottom of the ocean is compressed by the weight of the water above it all the way to the surface, and is more dense than the water at the surface. So even though liquids can compress a tiny bit we cannot reduce the inter-molecular distance beyond a certain limit without changing its phase.
So my question is... If we had a container, filled with liquid, and we placed a small sound emitting speaker and noise detector into the liquid and then compressed the liquid as much as possible using a piston... would a sound wave (which is a compression of the medium it is in) be able to travel from the emitter to the detector?
Or would the liquid (which is already compressed to its max value) act almost like a perfectly rigid body and instantly dampen the sound wave?