Sound is not exclusive to air, it can be generalized to vibrations in any media. Whale song and dolphin echolocation are certainly sounds, and we’re almost always talking about them propagating in water rather than air.
which has to travel from one place to the next
No, that isn’t how sound works. In air this would be a description of wind, not sound.
just transfer kinetic energy to the adjacenct atom
This is actually a good description of how sound waves propagate.
The push would travel at the speed of sound in the stick, much slower than the speed of light
In a “perfectly rigid” stick (a fictional invention), the speed of sound is the speed of light.
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Sound is not exclusive to air, it can be generalized to vibrations in any media. Whale song and dolphin echolocation are certainly sounds, and we’re almost always talking about them propagating in water rather than air.
No, that isn’t how sound works. In air this would be a description of wind, not sound.
This is actually a good description of how sound waves propagate.