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

    • 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.