Can sound waves travel faster than the speed of light?
Yes, says Joel Mobley, a physicist at the University of Mississippi in the US. In simulations, Mobley demonstrates that ultrasound pulses could move at “superluminal” speeds (at the speed of light or exceeding that) when transmitted through water that contains thousands of tiny plastic beads.
Mobley calculated that the “group velocity” of a pulse of high-frequency sound waves could be increased by five orders of magnitude by sending it through a small chamber that contains about 8 milliliters of water and some 400,000 tiny plastic spheres. This means that the group velocity would exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. The spheres have diameters of about 0.1 mm and account for about 5% of the volume of the water-bead mixture.
The increase in speed is caused by dispersion — the phenomenon that causes different wavelengths to move at different…
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idealisticrebel 
Thank you Barbara…
I didn’t actually expect people to go much for my science articles… I found in time that they are fairly popular though with my audience. The later articles really are much better than this one — as a result — since I had to get better with the science to feel good about my presentations.
A couple of them got used by science classes — how about that…
Thanks again… HUGS
~ Eric
Now that is pretty cool. Hugs, Barbara