It can look dumb, but I always had this question as a kid, what physical principles would prevent this?
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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The push would travel at the speed of sound in the stick, much slower than the speed of light
In a "perfectly rigid" stick (a fictional invention), the speed of sound is the speed of light.
No it wouldn’t. Sound is air vibration, which has to travel from one place to the next, static atoms don’t have to actually move to a place just transfer kinetic energy to the adjacenct atom, so it would be much closer to the speed of light. Although probably still (relatively (get it??)) slower.
Sound is not exclusive to air, it can be generalized to vibrations in any media. Whale song and dolphin echolocation are certainly sounds, and we're almost always talking about them propagating in water rather than air.
No, that isn't how sound works. In air this would be a description of wind, not sound.
This is actually a good description of how sound waves propagate.
It's still called the speed of sound. Your intuition is correct in that it's much higher for solid things, but it's still much slower than the speed of light.