• Question: Who discovered sound waves?

    Asked by anon-245170 to Alice on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Alice Morris

      Alice Morris answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      In the 4th century BC, Aristotle claimed that a sound wave travels in air through motion of the air, but this was based more on philosophy than on experimental physics.

      However, we know for sure that later on an Italian physicist, Galileo Galilei, discovered more about the properties of sound waves, and was the first scientist to record the relationship between the frequency of the wave to the pitch it produces. He discovered this around the 1660s.

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