Tuesday 26 April 2016

classical mechanics - Is it possible to break bulletproof glass with your voice?

This must be impossible, even for lady Castafiore with her earthquake voice. For a glass to break by sheer sound you need to produce a tone equal to the glass's natural frequency - the frequency at which a body vibrates with the least amount of energy. In other words: there you get the most vibration with a minimum of effort. This is also called resonance.



However, it is much harder to create resonance in mixed materials because each component has a different fundamental frequency. So two layers of different types of glass will effectively prevent resonance.



Of course, apart from that the mere thickness of the material will be a problem for our Nightingale.

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