/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5688903
Entropy can be a very difficult quantity to get your head around. Sometimes you can think of "constant entropy" as the same thing as "no flow/exchange of heat" (no heat exchange is also called an "adiabatic process"). So the equation basically says:

"The speed of sound (squared) equals the change in pressure when the density is changed with no exchange of heat".

I'm not entirely familiar with the equation, but to my knowledge it can be understood as, as you change the density, in air for example, how much does the air molecules push on their nearby neighbors? If the answer is a lot, then the molecules will quickly exert a high pressure on the next molecules and so forth so the sound will travel fast. You can imagine the sound travelling through molecules in the air (or another medium) as a longitudinal wave travelling through a spring. Pic related.