4 ms·
The physics of hand clapping
- nwoli 3y agoOne of the few articles you’d write and AI stock photos wouldn’t be helpful
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tim-fan 3y ago>As two flat hands collide, the air between them is forced out increasingly quickly, ultimately exceeding the speed of sound. This creates an abrupt pressure change, resulting in shock waves that make up a large part of the noise we hear So the clap is a mini sonic boom between your hands?
- dmbche 3y agoThe sonic boom comes from the object going faster than its own soundwave and crossing it, this just seems to be the product of a big pressure differential between the clap and ambiant air
- tgv 3y agoThat sounds surprising to me, too, because I can vary the loudness by moving one hand faster or slower towards the other. My intuition says that a sonic boom is a "catastrophic" event, so there should be a threshold. I'm wondering how they measured that.
- treyfitty 3y agoThe most interesting part of this statement is that you physically move both hands to clap… I let my dominant hand “hit” my other hand… is that not how everyone does it lol
- magicalhippo 3y agoI mostly move both, but vary a bit depending on intensity and frequency. It's faster to clap against, but I get more sound moving both. It also spreads the effort, so I prefer it for low intensity clapping.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoI think you'll be ok, considering at least one person does this: https://twitter.com/MetroUK/status/748854767938473984 https://twitter.com/MetroUK/status/748854767938473984
- Sakos 3y agoLook around sometime. I never see everybody clapping the same way. There are tons of variations, including what you do, and plenty of people use them.
- saberience 3y agoI do not believe there is a literal "sonic boom" when clapping. It's possible to cap very slowly and still make a small noise and I don't believe my slow-clapping is pushing air around at 343 meters per second.
- whatshisface 3y agoWhy not? The size of the channel it has to move through goes to zero as your hands meet, but the volume reduction per second is roughly constant. That means the velocity goes to "infinity."
- pluijzer 3y agoStill doesn't explain the sound of one hand clapping.
- sublinear 3y agoWhat's with all the fake science content lately trying to claim all sound is caused by sonic booms?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- misnome 3y agoInteresting! Presumably you have a source backing up the claim that the article and paper it’s based on are fake?
- saberience 3y agoYou think a gentle clap is pushing air around at 343 meters per second?
- anon____ 3y agoWell, not around. The sound of a clap is travelling exactly with the speed of... sound. But not one bit faster, of course.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- misnome 3y agoI dunno, unlike - apparently - you, I'm not an expert on the last few microseconds of the microfluidics of what happens to small volumes of air suddenly evacuated from a hand-sized area under constant compression. I take it that this means your source for refutation is "Lack of imagination"?
- saberience 3y agoWhy would the air move 1000X faster than the hands are moving? You don’t need air moving at the speed of sound to create noise. I can gently scratch a table surface and create noise and it’s not because of a sonic boom happening. If I gently tap my fingers together slowly in a quiet room I can hear the sound. It’s not a sonic boom clearly. Neither is a sonic boom happening when I scratch my elbow and can hear it.
- cloudmike 3y agoFinger snapping is fascinating too. I always assumed the sound happens when your finger rubs quickly against your thumb. But it’s actually after that, when your finger strikes the fleshy part of your thumb. You can verify this by blocking your finger from striking your hand. So it’s actually more like finger clapping. The “snap” part just lets you build energy for the “clap” part. Maybe obvious to some but I amazingly only learned this later in life.
- michelb 3y agoI’m curious how finger snapping started. Someone must have been the first and thought it was useful. I can’t remember when I learned it myself, i must have been very young when i was taught how to do it. Edit: and then there is Beshkan, which TIL.
- rvieira 3y agoJust as side note, I clap as in figure A2. However, it's one of those things in life where I don't remember when or why I started doing it like that. Surely I didn't clap like that before my earliest memories (3 or 4 yo).