Question #5f99a
1 Answer
Jul 21, 2014
Explain why someone inside a room can hear some people talking in a corridor outside the room but they cannot see them because they are around a corner?
The problem requires a discussion of why sound can diffract sufficiently around the corner to reach the observer but light cannot. Remember that the key concept is comparing the width of the gap (the doorway) with the width of the wave (sound and light in this case) that is diffracting through it and linking that to when maximum diffraction occurs (in this problem only one of the waves exhibits maximum diffraction).
