a professional sound measurement device, to assess noise exposure in communities around the United States. But you don’t need a fancy device to get a sense of your own noise exposure.

Students recently traversed the North Campus to answer these questions, with physics. Equipped with sound level meters (i.e., their smartphones), they’ve measured and recorded sound levels in various ...

From this measurement, they obtained a value for the speed of sound in this medium that is nearly half the speed of light and has a record precision: in units of the speed of light, the squared ...