what travels faster, light or sound?

Question

because, when you bounce a basket ball, in the outside, like on a driveway, you hear the echo maybe half a second later. but when you flick a light switch, the light goes on immediately. but then, the sound has to travel to the atmoshere and back, so what is faster?

Answer 1

Yes, light travels faster than sound. You can tell from several
examples. The best would probably be that of lightning and thunder. The next
time during a storm, if you notice when lightning flashes across the sky and
when you hear thunder, you will find that it is always the lightning that
flashes before the thunder. This is because lightning (i.e. light) travels
faster than thunder (i.e. sound), and reaches you faster, so that you see the
lightning before you hear the thunder. In fact, light is enormously faster than
sound. Light travels at 300,000,000 metres per second (i.e. 300 million metres
per second), while poor old sound travels only at 330 metres per second.

Answer 2

Light is much faster than sound. At sea level and in air, sound travels at 340.29 m/s. Light in a vacuum travels at 299,792,458 m/s. The example of the basketball is a good example, but the light switch is not a good measure of the speed of sound. Light travels much too fast to measure with the naked eye. In fact, nothing can travel faster than light. So everything is slower than light.

Answer 3

Light travels faster than sound. In vacuum, the speed of light is about 3.0 x 10^8 m/s while that of sound is 0 m/s (sound needs a medium to travel, hence it cannot travel through a vacuum). In air, the speed of sound is approximately 340 m/s while that of light is the same as in the previous condition.

Hope it answers your question...

Answer 4

Light

Answer 5

When there is lightning and thunder, every one is familiar that thunder is followed by lightning. This makes everyone to understand that light travels faster than sound.

When you switch on or off a light switch, the light is on or off immediately. This indicates that light travels almost instantaneously. If light travels slowly than the sound, the clicking sound of switch will be heard first and after certain time the light will be on.

Answer 6

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
what travels faster, light or sound?
because, when you bounce a basket ball, in the outside, like on a driveway, you hear the echo maybe half a second later. but when you flick a light switch, the light goes on immediately. but then, the sound has to travel to the atmoshere and back, so what is faster?

Answer 7

Sound does not have to travel to the atmosphere and back. Sound goes in straight lines like light. Under most circumstances, light is a lot faster than sound.

Answer 8

Hi:

The answer is light . It travel at 186,282 mile per second or go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second while sound travels 750 mile per hour or about 1,100 ft per second this is why you see the lighting flash during a thunderstorm then you hear the KA BOOM seconds later in fact if you count the seconds after see the flash and when you hear the KA BOOM and divide by 5. You can figure out how many miles away the lighting bolt is away from you.

Amazing fact: For sound to go from New York to Los Angeles
will take 4 hour to cross the 3,000 mile distance while light take about one ten of a seconds to get there

.

Answer 9

Light is clearly faster than sound. In your question, even if we remove echo, the light travels fast. When any cracker blasts off in the sky, we see the light first and then the sound. Here, there's no echo. In your case, you tell your friend to stand at a distance of say 400m. and then simultaneously bounce the basketball and switch on a torch and then ask ur friend which event did he realise earlier, light or sound? We did this to remove echo. And a clear example is that of lightning during rains. We see the lightning first and then hear the thunder. Here, there's no echo but still light reaches us sooner than sound. And finally, the speed of light in air is 3 lakhs km./second and that of sound is merely 332 m /s, so there's no comparison or doubt whatsoever.

Answer 10

For most medium, light travels much faster than sound.

The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is the fastest rate that any information can propogate in normal space and is therefore faster than sound in any medium.

In normal air, the speed of light is only slightly slower than c, so light still wins by many many times.

The fastest propogation for sound would occur in a neutron star with sound traveling at approximately 1/3 of c. Light would still be faster in that medium.

Researchers at Stanford using a Bose-Einstein condensate have slowed the speed of light to less than 1 meter per second (which is much slower than sound in regular air) -- B-E condensates are super-cooled materials where quantum particles occupy highly limited energy states.