3238: Soniferous Aether

Soniferous Aether

|< < Prev #3238 (April 27, 2026)

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.

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Explanation

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 2959: Beam of Light), 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 Concorde were both commercial aircraft that did manage to achieve the ability to go supersonic, aside from (briefly) a DC-8.

Transcript

[Ponytail is addressing an unseen audience in front of her while she holds her hand out towards them. She is standing on a podium with Cueball behind her. Cueball holds an arm out behind him indicating a screen behind him showing a graph with three sinus waves with different wavelengths. The top has two cycles, the middle four cycles and the bottom one cycle.]

Ponytail: We all know the speed of light is constant for all observers.

Ponytail: But our experiments show that the speed of sound changes based on the observer's motion.

Ponytail: Thus, we posit the existence of the Soniferous Aether, a medium that fills the space between us and carries sound waves.

[Caption below the panel:]

Sometimes physicists forget that air exists and rediscover it from first principles.

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Discussion

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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