3238: Soniferous Aether
| Soniferous Aether |
 Title text: Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We're putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out. |
Explanation
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This is one of 69 incomplete explanations: This page was created recently by a BOT THAT BREATHES SONIFEROUS AETHER. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
This comic makes a joke on the speed of light and the speed of sound, and the way in which they travel.
Scientists beginning in the late 1690s would discuss a luminiferous aether to explain properties of light, especially its ability to travel in a vacuum, which should not be possible for a wave. The 1887 Michelson–Morley experiment disproved its existence, and nowadays, this property is explained by wave–particle duality, which says that light can act as both a particle and a wave.
The title text references Albert Einstein's thought experiment where he imagined riding alongside a light particle/wave (which was referenced in XKCD 2959), but with a sound wave instead. Travelling at the speed of sound can be accomplished with a fast airplane, usually military aircraft, however the Tu-144 and Concordé were both commericial aircraft that did manage to achieve the ability to go supersonic, aside from (briefly) a DC-8.
Transcript
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This is one of 42 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
Ponytail: We all know the speed of light is constant for all observers. But out experiments show that the speed of sound changes based on the observer's motion. Thus, we posit the existence of a Soniferous Aether, a medium that fills the space between us and carries sound waves.
Caption: Sometimes Physicists forget that air exists and rediscover it from first principles.
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Dunno how, but I managed to get to an XKCD comic within the first like 5 minutes of it's upload. Went ahead and added a really bare bones explanation. People funnier and smarter than me can take it from there. RG (talk) 04:24, 28 April 2026 (UTC)
managed to get to the xkcd comic before this page was even made somehow so yeah. --Utdtutyabthsc (talk) 04:49, 28 April 2026 (UTC)
ah, i have a script which polls for the new comic pages on comic days and sends a webhook to alert me as well as sending a request to another program of mine to index the new page, so i fairly often find that the wiki page has been made by the bot but is completely empty when i get to it--or on rare occasions the webhook triggers before the xkcd.com/<number> url can embed, apparently; i guess the comic metadata JSON gets filled in before the image is, or something like that? (the webhook triggers sending a message to discord with the link, which embeds 99% of the time) - Vaedez (talk) 05:03, 28 April 2026 (UTC)
"...however the Tu-144 and Concordé..." - why the rogue accent? Was the author's reasoning that, as a French word, it is de rigueur (see what I did there) for it to include accents? As errors go, it's acute one... 50.45.232.78 05:21, 28 April 2026 (UTC)
- The rogue accent has been removed with the speed of sound. But what about that supersonic DC-8. --Coconut Galaxy (talk) 05:26, 28 April 2026 (UTC)
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