Physics of Echolocation :: physics echo echolocation

While visiting the Grand Canyons, you couldnt honestly identify me that you didnt scream into the bottomyon just to hear your echo enter back to you. Dont be ashamed, we all do it. many an otherwise(prenominal) kinds of animals actually use their echo to find out where they are in a closed area or to find out if there are any other animals close by. One classic subject is the thrash.To understand what an echo is, you first have to understand what good for you(p) is. In Websters Fourth Edition College Dictionary, exit is vibrations in air, water, etc. that perk the auditory nerves and produce the sensation of hearing. Vibrations through the air can be thought of as oscillation of molecules. As the molecules oscillate, they pass vim on to ring molecules, and those molecules pass energy on to other surrounding molecules. This is how sound travels, and the oscillation of the molecules is often referred to as sound waves.An echo happens when the sound waves reach a surfa ce, bounce off of it and travel in the reversion direction. For optimum echoes, the surface should be perpendicular to the waves, and as frictionless as possible. In places like the Grand Canyons, you can hear many echoes because the sound waves bounce off of surfaces, then others bounce off of other surfaces, and well-nigh will bounce back to you, but at different times.In echolocation, dotty institutionalise out short pulses that have a postgraduate frequency. The short pulses that the kooky send out have such a high frequency that the average human cannot hear them. The waves that the bats send ripple out from them circularly and will bounce off of anything that is in the bats way, and will also go back to the bat in the form of an echo. By instinctively examining the echoes that they receive, the bats will be able to tell the direction that the object is coming or loss from, how fast it is going that way and how far away it is from the bat. Some bats can even tell h ow big the object is that is in their way. If bats didnt have the use of echolocation, theyd need some other way to stay alive, because echolocation is the bats way of life. It is the uncomplicated reason that it is able to live in its environment.