Читать книгу Sound - John Tyndall - Страница 14

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When a long sea-roller meets an isolated rock in its passage, it rises against the rock and embraces it all round. Facts of this nature caused Newton to reject the undulatory theory of light. He contended that if light were a product of wave-motion we could have no shadows, because the waves of light would propagate themselves round opaque bodies as a wave of water round a rock. It has been proved since his time that the waves of light do bend round opaque bodies; but with that we have nothing now to do. A sound-wave certainly bends thus round an obstacle, though as it diffuses itself in the air at the back of the obstacle it is enfeebled in power, the obstacle thus producing a partial shadow of the sound. A railway train passing through cuttings and long embankments exhibits great variations in the intensity of the sound. The interposition of a hill in the Alps suffices to diminish materially the sound of a cataract; it is able sensibly to extinguish the tinkle of the cowbells. Still the sound-shadow is but partial, and the marker at the rifle-butts never fails to hear the explosion, though he is well protected from the ball. A striking example of this diffraction of a sonorous wave was exhibited at Erith after the tremendous explosion of a powder magazine which occurred there in 1864. The village of Erith was some miles distant from the magazine, but in nearly all cases the windows were shattered; and it was noticeable that the windows turned away from the origin of the explosion suffered almost as much as those which faced it. Lead sashes were employed in Erith Church, and these, being in some degree flexible, enabled the windows to yield to pressure without much fracture of the glass. As the sound-wave reached the church it separated right and left, and, for a moment, the edifice was clasped by a girdle of intensely compressed air, every window in the church, front and back, being bent inward. After compression, the air within the church no doubt dilated, tending to restore the windows to their first condition. The bending in of the windows, however, produced but a small condensation of the whole mass of air within the church; the recoil was therefore feeble in comparison with the pressure, and insufficient to undo what the latter had accomplished.