Special Relativity – Do Bats Use Special Relativity for Echolocation?

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I'm trying to find a "classical" thought experiment to form a better intuition for special relativity.

Bats are creatures that observe their world via echolocation. Their observations are bound by the speed of sound in air (~343 meters per second). Assume three bats, A, B and C, move relative to each other. Each bat observes the other's position and speed via echolocation. Bat C measures bat A's and B's position and velocity, and wants to determine bat B's position and velocity, as observed by bat A.

Does bat C need to use the Lorentz transformation with $c$ equal to the speed of sound?

Best Answer

Nope, the "$c$" in the Lorentz Transformations doesn't just apply to the speed of propagation of information in a medium, though I understand why you might think of it that way. Instead, the Lorentz Transformations are fundamental to the structure of space and time itself. In particular, they imply that the speed of light $c$ is frame independent: all inertial observers will agree on this quantity.

Such an argument cannot hold for the speed of sound in a medium, which is not something fundamental, but which depends on properties of the medium itself like its density and pressure. Indeed, objects can (and frequently do) travel faster than the speed of sound in a medium. Furthermore, it should be clear that if you consider just the bats moving in air, they don't even satisfy the basic criterion for relativity: for example, the Doppler Effect for sound clearly distinguishes cases where the "source" is really moving and where the "observer" is really moving (with respect to the ambient medium).

The big result of special relativity is that there is one -- and only one -- frame independent speed, and that is $c$, the speed at which light happens to travel. It makes no physical sense to speak of a speed greater than this value. The speed limit of 343 m/s in your problem, however, is a biological limit. If the bats in your problem were replaced by fighter jets, they would certainly be able to move faster than the speed of sound. So I see no reason to draw a parallel. In other words, you don't need to teach the bats Special Relativity: good old-fashioned Newtonian mechanics should work fine.

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