2. Archibald, an aging geezer, is out bicycling one fine afternoon, reliving his glorious youth and oblivious to the world around him. As he approaches a busy intersection, a police officer directing traffic blows his whistle to get Archie's attention so he'll slow down and stop. But Archie doesn’t stop; he just speeds right through the intersection as if the traffic cop wasn’t even there. The cop radios one of his colleagues and gets her to stop the old geezer. She gives him a traffic citation for failing to heed the command of a police officer directing traffic. When the case gets to traffic court, Archie explains to the judge that he didn’t hear the officer's whistle because he is going deaf and cannot hear frequencies above 3000 Hz. The traffic cop informs the judge that his standard issue police whistle emits a frequency of 2100 Hz and he has a certificate to prove it. Thinking quickly (at least for an old geezer) Archie says that it may be true that the police whistle emits a sound of 2100 Hz, but since he was riding towards the officer, the sound from the officer's whistle was Doppler shifted above the highest frequency Archie can hear. Is Archie's explanation reasonable? How fast would Archie have to be bicycling in order for his explanation to be valid? (Note that 1 m/s is equal to 2.22 mph.)
Properties of sound
A sound wave is a mechanical wave (or mechanical vibration) that transit through media such as gas (air), liquid (water), and solid (wood).
Quality Of Sound
A sound or a sound wave is defined as the energy produced due to the vibrations of particles in a medium. When any medium produces a disturbance or vibrations, it causes a movement in the air particles which produces sound waves. Molecules in the air vibrate about a certain average position and create compressions and rarefactions. This is called pitch which is defined as the frequency of sound. The frequency is defined as the number of oscillations in pressure per second.
Categories of Sound Wave
People perceive sound in different ways, like a medico student takes sound as vibration produced by objects reaching the human eardrum. A physicist perceives sound as vibration produced by an object, which produces disturbances in nearby air molecules that travel further. Both of them describe it as vibration generated by an object, the difference is one talks about how it is received and other deals with how it travels and propagates across various mediums.
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