What state of matter do waves move fastest through? What about slowest? Why is this so?

Answer 1

What type of waves are you referring to? I assume you mean sound waves and not electromagnetic (light) waves.

Sound propagates by the vibration of the particles of the medium in which is it traveling in. In other words, sound travels by particles colliding with other particles and passing the energy along through the collisions. The faster these collisions occur, the faster the sound wave moves.

In what type of medium (or state of matter) will these collisions occur the fastest in? Solid, liquid, gas? Think of how the particles are arranged in each state.

The particles in a gas are spread out very far apart so one particle carrying the energy of the sound wave would have to travel a great distance before hitting another particle and transferring that energy. In liquids, the particle are much closer together, but still are comparably farther apart than in the solid state of matter.
In solids, the particles are spaced very closely together and they cannot move very far without hitting another particle. The denser the medium, the shorter the time it will take for one particle to collide wit the next.
So sound travels faster through dense mediums such as solids and slower through things like gasses due to the much greater separation between the particles of the system.

Answer 2

Well I assume you mean electromagnetic radiation ("waves"), including, but certainly not limited to light. The answer is straightforward:

1. Light moves fastest in a vacuum, where there is essentially no medium, approximately 186,000 miles per second. (A light year in space being about 186,000 miles x 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365.25 days, i.e. how far light travels in a year in the vacuum of space.)

2. Light moves most slowly, mostly not at all, when caught in a sigularity, an entity much denser than a neutron star, such as a black hole where gravity and density approach infinity. Light, for the most part, with some exceptions in the form of irregular gamma irradiation due to the "uneveness" of the singularity I suppose, cannot move at all. That is the speed is mostly zero.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

Solids. The atoms are connected and follow each other much more quickly than in liquids (a close second) or gases (a distant third)