Solved cryptogram

Sound travels several times faster through water than through air, and faster still in steel.

Physics Facts, sourced to HyperPhysics, Georgia State University.

Solve it yourself

This fact is a cryptogram here: 77 letters over 17 different ones, graded medium.

Or go to the puzzle’s own page first.

What it means

Sound is a squeeze passed from one particle to the next, so it moves fastest where the material resists being squeezed and the particles are close together. Air carries it at around three hundred and forty meters a second, water at about four times that, and steel at roughly fifteen times. Putting an ear to a rail to hear a distant train is the old use of this, and it is also why whales can call across an ocean basin.

The claim comes from HyperPhysics, Georgia State University.

Nearby in the collection

The facts either side of this one.

About as hard as this one

Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.

Play a cryptogram

Every Physics Facts cryptogram · All fact collections