It can look dumb, but I always had this question as a kid, what physical principles would prevent this?

  • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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    9 hours ago

    Even if it were perfectly rigid, supernaturally so, your push would still only transmit through the stick at the speed of light. The speed of light is the speed of time.

    • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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      9 hours ago

      The push would travel at the speed of sound in the stick, much slower than the speed of light

        • 4z01235@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          Sound is air vibration

          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.

          which has to travel from one place to the next

          No, that isn’t how sound works. In air this would be a description of wind, not sound.

          just transfer kinetic energy to the adjacenct atom

          This is actually a good description of how sound waves propagate.