An echo of Einstein: An unexpected link between whale calls and special relativity
Standing on the sandy, windswept shores of Provincetown, Massachusetts, people may find themselves squinting at the horizon, waiting for a whale to make its grand entrance with a spectacular breach.
On a windswept shore in Massachusetts, John Spiesberger, an oceanographer, relies on the calls of whales to detect and track them underwater. These calls travel far, allowing Spiesberger to pinpoint the whale's location by comparing when the sound reaches receivers spread across the seafloor. However, when tracking nearby whales, standard physics can place the animal off by hundreds of meters.
A recent study in the journal Physical Review E, co-authored by Spiesberger and Eugene Terray of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, reveals an unexpected link between these whale calls and the special theory of relativity. The sound of a whale call doesn't travel as a single path but splits into a direct signal and a reflected echo.
This interference can cause the peak of the energy to shift earlier, producing inferred sound speeds below or above seawater's normal speed and causing location errors. Although this seems to violate Einstein's theory, it doesn't. The information encoded in the waves still cannot travel faster than light, preserving causality. The study's findings could improve whale tracking for conservationists, and Spiesberger plans to test the effect in real-world conditions.
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