Sonic boom faster than the speed of sound, thus creating a sonic boom. The whip is probably the first human invention to break the sound barrier. A bullwhip tapers down from the handle section to the cracker. The cracker has much less mass than the handle section. When the whip is sharply swung, the energy is transferred down the length of the tapering whip. Goriely and McMillen showed that the physical explanation is complex, involving the way that a loop travels down a tapered filament under tension. Sonic boom A sonic boom is the sound associated with the shock waves created whenever
Shock wave Advanced techniques are needed to capture shock waves and to detect shock waves in both numerical computations and experimental observations. Computational fluid dynamics is commonly used to obtain the flow field with shock waves. Though shock waves are sharp discontinuities, in numerical solutions of fluid flow with discontinuities (shock wave, contact discontinuity or slip line), the shock wave can be smoothed out by low-order numerical method (due to numerical dissipation) or there are spurious oscillations near shock surface by high-order numerical method (due to Gibbs phenomena). There exist some other discontinuities in fluid flow than the shock wave. The slip