this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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How do scientists know how acoustics work? (piefed.social)
submitted 5 days ago by breb@piefed.social to c/askphysics@lemmy.world
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I've seen lot of theory about how it works.
But how do they get to that conclusion?
As far a i know, you can see that it's air vibrating bc when there's a loud noise you can feel the floor vibrating or if i drop something in a table and i place my hand on it i can feel the table vibrating as well. But how do they know it in more detail. How do they know about the pith and that it's a wave?

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[–] iii@mander.xyz 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

How do they know about the pith and that it's a wave?

What you're maybe confused about is that textbooks often oversimplify and depict sound as a pure sine wave. That only rarely happens, and is usually man made.

Day-to-day sounds can be approximated as the sum of such perfect sine waves. Fourier transformations are a well known method for that.

That approximation usually isn't perfect. But it's good enough to be usefull.