How could you test the hypothesis that elephants interpreted the ground signal as being farther away than the air signal?

Physics

1 answer:

bekas [8.4K]3 years ago

3 0

Answer:

One way to test the hypothesis is to create two waves, one in the air and one on the ground at the same time. One of them for the elephant to get closer and another for the elephants to move away. Observe the reaction of the animal and with this we know which sound came first.

Explanation:

This hypothesis is based on the fact that the speed of sound in air is v = 343 m / s with a small variation with temperature.

The speed of sound in solid soil is an average of the speed of its constituent media, giving values between

wood 3900 m / s

concrete 4000 m / s

fabrics 1540 m / s

earth 5000 m / s wave S

ground 7000 m / s P wave

we can see that the speed on solid earth is an order of magnitude greater than in air.

From the initial information, the wave going through the ground should arrive first.

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so I know you can solve this either by using Vox or Voy. I'm getting 3.08s when using Vox and 3.14s for Voy way. For Voy I'm usi

Tatiana [17]

The person's horizontal position is given by

$x=v_0\cos40^\circ t$

and the time it takes for him to travel 56.6 m is

$56.6\,\mathrm m=\left(24.0\,\dfrac{\mathrm m}{\mathrm s}\right)\cos40^\circ t\implies t=3.08\,\mathrm s$

so your first computed time is the correct one.

The question requires a bit of careful reading, and I think there may be a mistake in the problem. The person's vertical velocity $v_y$ at time $t$ is

$v_y=v_{0y}-gt$

which tells us that he would reach the ground at about $t=3.15\,\mathrm s$ . In this time, he would have traveled

$x=v_{0x}(3.15\,\mathrm s)=57.9\,\mathrm m$

But we're told that he is caught by a net at 56.6 m, which would mean that the net cannot have been placed at the same height from which he was launched. However, it's possible that the moment at which he was launched doesn't refer to the moment the cannon went off, but rather the moment at which the person left the muzzle of the cannon a fraction of a second after the cannon was set off. After this time, the person's initial vertical velocity $v_{0y}$ would have been a bit smaller than $\left(24.0\,\frac{\mathrm m}{\mathrm s}\right)\sin40^\circ$ .